Reclaiming Hegel From The Fourth Political Theory

by Zoltanous

Introduction

Alexander Dugin’s attempt to resurrect what he calls a “pure” Hegel for his Fourth Political Theory (4PT) reads less like a genuine philosophical recovery and more like a precarious house of cards built from half-truths, selective readings, and a self-serving agenda. He argues that liberalism, Marxism, and fascism, the dominant ideologies of Western modernity, have distorted Hegel’s system, especially Hegel’s account of the state as the “march of God on Earth.” In response, Dugin presents 4PT as the vehicle for restoring Hegel’s allegedly uncorrupted meaning, leaning heavily on Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as a kind of philosophical support. Yet this support collapses under scrutiny. Rather than securing 4PT within Hegel’s dialectics, Dasein functions as an escape hatch that pulls Dugin away from the unifying work of Spirit, and the consequences of that shift reverberate throughout his critique.

Dugin’s project, then, is not the principled rescue mission he claims. It is a strained and disingenuous reconstruction that ends up betraying the very spirit of Hegelian thought it invokes. His treatment of fascism, in particular, is marked by historical imprecision and philosophical flattening, including the peculiar claim that fascism was little more than a puppet of capitalism. From the standpoint of a dialectical approach informed by major scholarship on fascism and its philosophical foundations, including the work of A. James Gregor, Stanley G. Payne, Roger Griffin, and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Dugin’s framing is difficult to accept and his conclusions hard to sustain. This critique will take Dugin’s argument apart step by step, highlighting its internal tensions, weak links, and evasions. Drawing on Hegel’s conceptual rigor and on scholars who have confronted these questions with far greater care, I argue that Dugin’s 4PT is not a revival of Hegel’s Spirit but a departure from it, a slide into relativism and ideological confusion.

Dugin’s Hegelian Misadventure

Dugin opens his project with a sweeping and self-important accusation that immediately signals the tone of his misguided undertaking:

“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 presents 4PT as a gallant knight charging in to rescue Hegel’s allegedly sullied legacy from the ravages of liberalism, Marxism, and fascism. Yet this opening gesture rests on unstable ground. Hegel’s philosophy is not a fragile relic in need of salvation, but a living, dynamic system driven by contradiction, struggle, and the ceaseless movement of synthesis.

“The true is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.”

— Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

For Hegel, history is not a museum exhibit to be dusted off and preserved. It is a violent and unforgiving arena in which Spirit forces itself into actuality through conflict, negation, and rupture. Dugin’s fixation on a pristine, untainted Hegel obscures this elemental dynamism. His claim that liberalism, Marxism, and fascism somehow mutilated Hegel’s vision reads less as a philosophical discovery than as an admission of his own narrowness. The irony is hard to miss. In denouncing others for distortion, Dugin freely reshapes Hegel to serve a fragmented and ultimately anti-dialectical project in 4PT. Nowhere is this failure more visible than in his treatment of fascism, where the fissures in his argument announce themselves unmistakably.

Dugin’s attack on fascism as a supposed perversion of Hegel rests on a fragile tripod of claims: that Italian Fascism was merely subservient to capitalism, that its retention of the monarchy rendered it philosophically hollow, and that National Socialism’s biological racism, along with both regimes’ alleged inability to realize Hegel’s constitutional monarchy as a synthesis of civil society into the Volk, disqualifies them outright.

“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

This is pure, unfiltered nonsense: a timid and superficial misreading that ignores fascism’s intellectual seriousness, its dialectical intensity, and its revolt against the liberal economic order. Dugin’s most egregious distortion is the claim that Italian Fascism functioned as a mere instrument of capitalism or was somehow bent to serve its interests.

“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

The argument is so frail that it disintegrates at the slightest pressure. It is a historical and economic fiction that does violence to the revolutionary ethos at the core of Fascism itself. Rather than extending the liberal legacy of the Risorgimento, Fascism overturned it, absorbing what remained of bourgeois liberalism into a state-centered ethical order. The Risorgimento’s liberal nationalism, from Mazzini’s republican aspirations to Cavour’s parliamentary monarchy, sought national unity grounded in individual rights and constitutional ideals. Fascism transformed this inheritance through a totalizing negation, dismantling liberalism at its foundations. Mussolini himself demolishes Dugin’s claim with unmistakable force:

“The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State.”

— Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism

Far from acting as capitalism’s lapdog, the Fascist state gripped it firmly and compelled it to serve national ends. The 1927 Carta del Lavoro was no courteous recommendation but a hard directive, subordinating industry to the state through corporatism that fused labor and capital into a single organism governed by national priorities. This was not capitalism unleashed. It was capitalism constrained and redirected, pressed into the service of what was presented as a higher ethical purpose, a putative Hegelian synthesis that sought to discipline civil society’s fragmented self-interest into an ordered whole.

“Socialization was, in fact, the product of a maturation of trends already implicit in the earliest Fascist formulations. The trend that matured into socializations was already manifest by the time of the Second Convention of Syndical and Corporative Studies, held in Ferrara in May 1932. Its substance was provided by the persistent socialist and anti-bourgeois biases of radical syndicalism conjoined with the totalitarian pretensions of neo-idealism.”

— A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism

By 1939, the IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale) controlled roughly 80% of naval production and about half of steel output, strangling the autonomy of private capital and forcing it into submission. Dugin’s sneer that Italy could “easily revert” to liberalism after 1945 is an act of intellectual evasion. Fascism did not unravel because it was comfortably aligned with capitalism; it was destroyed by the Allied war machine, and its economic order was dismantled through military defeat, not voluntary retreat. What was overturned was not a polite guardianship of bourgeois interests but a radical negation of civil society’s materialism, an unmistakable echo of Hegel’s own insistence on the subordination of particular interests to an ethical whole.

“The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Italian Fascism’s gradualist developmentalism, moving from heroic capitalism to corporatism and ultimately toward socialization, reflects a dialectical progression that closely parallels Hegel’s conception of the organic state in the Philosophy of Right, especially his account of Corporations. These institutions provided the most direct and consequential inspiration for Italian Fascist corporatism. Mussolini’s Sorelian-inflected syndicalism, once nationalized, performs precisely the function Hegel assigns to Corporations as mediating structures between civil society and the state. This continuity captures the movement’s electric origins, the philosophical foundations laid by Gentile, and the emergence of the Corporate State as a rational development toward what Fascism understood as a form of republican socialism, a trajectory analyzed in detail by A. James Gregor in Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship. Against this backdrop, Dugin’s assertion collapses into historical falsehood, overwhelmed by the cumulative weight of theory, practice, and scholarship.

Dugin offers a perfunctory acknowledgment of Giovanni Gentile’s Hegelian credentials, only to dismiss him as an incomplete and ultimately failed thinker:

“Fascist Italy largely retained the structures of economic capitalism and individualistic notions about the nature of man, characteristic of civil society.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

This is not merely a misstep. It is philosophical vandalism, a blunt attempt to dull one of the most powerful Hegelian currents of the twentieth century. Gentile’s Actual Idealism is no timid footnote. It is a roaring furnace, forged in the heat of Hegel’s dialectic:

“Only the act of thinking is real.”

— Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act

This is not a distortion at all but a direct descendant of Hegel’s Absolute, where he declares:

“The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Gentile’s Ethical State (Sittlichkeit) is no diluted compromise. It is a totalizing synthesis of individual and collective will, a form of statehood in which Spirit does not lie dormant but awakens forcefully, dissolving the petty divisions of civil society into a higher unity. His rejection of liberal individualism is unmistakable, leaving Dugin’s accusation without footing:

“Outside the State there is no individual.”

— Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society

This accords with Hegel’s insistence that freedom is realized only within the ethical totality of the state:

“The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

The 1925 Leggi Fascistissime were not a gentle nudge but a sledgehammer, annihilating dissent and concentrating authority with a force that would have elicited Hegel’s knowing assent.

“The Nation State is spirit in its actuality it is therefore the absolute power on earth.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Dugin’s jab at “individualistic notions” collapses on contact with reality. Fascism did not pamper liberalism; it shattered it, replacing it with a unified structure of collective purpose. Gentile’s vision was not a distortion of Hegel but an unleashing of Hegel’s Spirit, a forceful demonstration of the dialectic in action. Dugin instead retreats to a small and misplaced complaint, faulting Fascism for failing to cap civil society with a constitutional monarchy.

“It is noteworthy that Hegel specifically establishes the monarchy rather than simply preserving it.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He seizes on Victor Emmanuel II’s ceremonial position under Mussolini as proof of failure, as if this alone demonstrated Fascism’s deviation from Hegel. What emerges is Hegel refracted through a funhouse mirror: a pedantic literalism that fixates on surface forms while missing the substance beneath. Hegel’s monarchy is not a rigid constitutional template carved in stone but a symbolic expression of unity, a formal moment within the state rather than a concrete institutional command.

“The monarch is the individuality of the state as a whole.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Mussolini as Duce was not a deviation from Hegelian unity but its concrete embodiment: a sovereign figure who required no crown to concentrate and exercise the will of the state. This was not a ceremonial relic maintained out of nostalgic habit, but a modern force forged in struggle, asserting command over national destiny with uncompromising authority.

“If there was one thing all Fascists and National Socialists agreed on, it was their hostility to capitalism.”

— Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism

This line of argument is extended by Dugin beyond Italian Fascism to National Socialism, and it is here that the Hegelian inheritance becomes most consequential. Dugin reads Hegel’s doctrine of the Ethical State as structurally compatible with the Nazi conception of Volk and Volksgemeinschaft, treating the collective not merely as a sociological unit but as the locus of historical self-realization. In this reading, history advances through the unification of individual consciousness into a higher ethical totality, a movement that finds its concrete expression in a people bound together by a shared destiny and mediated through political leadership.

Within this, Spirit functions as a synthesizing force that reconciles the universal and the particular. The universal appears in the form of sovereign authority, while the particular is embodied in the lived substance of the people. Dugin argues that National Socialism radicalized this structure by negating liberal civil society altogether, replacing the mediation of abstract rights with an immediate ethical unity grounded in collective identity. On this basis, the Nazi state is presented not as a regression but as a historically determinate realization of ethical life, in which freedom is no longer individual but immanent to the collective whole.

This interpretation is not a simple distortion of Hegel but a plausible extrapolation from tensions already present in his political philosophy. Although Hegel insists that ethical life is grounded in rational law, he also subordinates individual autonomy to the actuality of the state, which he describes as the embodiment of objective Spirit. The individual becomes free only insofar as he identifies with this ethical totality, a formulation that leaves open the possibility that reason itself may be claimed to reside in a historically concrete community rather than in universal norms. Once this move is made, the transition from rational state to racialized political unity is not philosophically incoherent, even if it is morally catastrophic.

The juridical theorization of the Nazi state by figures such as Ernst Rudolf Huber illustrates how this transition was carried out in practice. Huber’s claim that individual rights are incompatible with the law of the nation, and that sovereignty is realized through unconditional submission to the Führer, reflects a legal philosophy that redefines freedom as participation in a higher ethical order rather than as the possession of subjective rights. This is not merely opportunistic propaganda but an internally consistent attempt to translate Hegelian ethical statism into a radically illiberal political form. In doing so, Sittlichkeit is reduced to obedience, yet this reduction follows from treating ethical life as unity rather than mediation. Objections raised by Carl Schmitt, who argued that personal rule hollowed out the state instead of fulfilling it, do not negate this connection. Even if Schmitt correctly diagnosed the internal contradictions of the Nazi regime, those contradictions emerge precisely from the attempt to realize a philosophy in which the state is elevated above civil society and individual autonomy is rendered secondary to historical destiny. The fusion of Volk, leader, and state does not perfect Hegel’s system, but it exposes the latent implications embedded within it.

What Dugin ultimately reveals is not a misuse of Hegel but the dangerous plasticity of his political concepts. Hegelian language did not merely legitimize National Socialism after the fact. It provided a philosophical grammar through which the regime could understand itself as the culmination of history rather than its negation. The connection between Hegel and Nazism is therefore not one of doctrinal continuity but of conceptual affordance. It lies in the way Hegel’s elevation of the state, his subordination of the individual, and his teleological view of history could be reassembled into a modern political myth with devastating consequences..

“Adolf Hitler has set his stamp on the word folk-community [Volksgemeinschaft]. This word is to make completely clear to the members of our people that the individual is nothing, when not a member of a community, and that the natural community is only the community of men of the same origin, same language, and same culture, i.e., the folk-community.”

“The folk-community is the natural presupposition for the existence of the whole people and indirectly, in the end, for the existence of each individual. Whoever wants to live and thrive in this world is obligated in the nature of things to orient his struggle for existence mainly toward the struggle for the vital rights of the folk-community and thus of the nation.”

“The folk-community is not spatially bounded; it includes all members of the people, without regard to residence or temporary place of abode; thus it includes also those who live outside the borders of the German state.”

— Raymond E. Murphy, National socialism: basic principles, their application by the Nazi party's foreign organization, and the use of Germans abroad for Nazi aims

The Volksgemeinschaft is presented as an organic community bound together by shared ethnicity, language, customs, traditions, economic life, and historical inheritance. It is awakened through National Socialism, which fuses leader, nation, and state into a single, unified whole, a sought-after harmony. Within this view, every German, irrespective of class, social position, residence, party affiliation, or even formal citizenship, is integrated into the collective. Each member bears an implicit obligation to submit to the will of the Volk, a will personified in the Führer through the Führerprinzip. As a result, the social duties imposed by the Volksgemeinschaft extend beyond Germany’s borders, shaping economic behavior and personal allegiance among Germans everywhere, demanding fidelity to its principles regardless of location. This logic is explicitly more Fichtean in view and finds clear parallels in Italian Fascism, including efforts to bind Italian communities abroad and entities such as the Free State of Fiume to the authority of the Duce.

Mussolini, no less than Hitler, did not merely govern the state; he embodied it, channeling the movement of Spirit in a manner that aligns with Hegel’s dialectical logic. Dugin’s fixation on constitutional monarchy amounts to little more than a narrow technical objection, one that obscures the more significant development. Fascist totalitarianism did not betray Hegel’s Spirit but released it, forging a unity that rendered the symbols and rituals of royal authority irrelevant. Yet Dugin’s pedantry does not end with monarchy. He presses further, retreating into legalistic complaints that ultimately undermine his own philosophical position.

Dugin derides fascism for what he portrays as juridical incoherence, casting it as a violation of Hegel’s vision. He focuses on Mussolini’s formally undefined role and on Hitler’s refusal to resurrect a monarchy or freeze his authority within a rigid constitutional framework, mistaking the absence of liberal legal formalism for failure.

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

“His [Hitler’s] dictatorial powers and charismatic status as ‘Führer’ did not receive full legal and constitutional development—despite significant theoretical developments in legal and constitutional models by German philosophers, especially Carl Schmitt.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He strikes a pose of philosophical rigor, insisting that Hegel’s rational state requires a juridical framing, a constitutional monarchy as its crowning structure, to house and stabilize Spirit’s ethical order, and he insists:

“However, Hegel’s main idea was the conscious establishment of a constitutional monarchy by civil society through overcoming itself. The monarchy was a principal moment here, as the singular monarch occupied the top of the hierarchical state, replacing the liberal triad of powers—judicial power.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

This fixation on legal form exposes a deep contradiction in Dugin’s own position. It clashes sharply with the Russian tradition of bezpravie (Russian lawlessness), a cultural and political ethos that rejects rigid legalism and instead elevates the unrestrained will of the sovereign.

“The West imposes its rationalist order, but Russia’s destiny lies in its rejection of this artificial legality for a deeper, existential truth.”

— Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

From Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina to Stalin’s purges, Russian political history repeatedly elevates the primacy of unbounded sovereign power over stable legal form. In Dugin’s own philosophy, this tradition becomes a source of strength: law is treated as expendable, while authority derives its legitimacy from raw decision and metaphysical will rather than juridical constraint. It is striking, then, that Dugin turns around and demands that Italian Fascism and National Socialism conform to a strict, legalistic reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (§§273–320), as if Hegel’s account of the state required a fixed constitutional shell to be authentic. This demand collides directly with the anti-legal ethos that animates his Russian-inflected 4PT.

The contradiction is revealing. Dugin reads Hegel’s monarchy as a static legal enclosure, when in Hegel it functions primarily as a symbolic moment of unity within the ethical whole. On this point, Dugin’s critique misses its mark. The absence of rigid constitutional formalism in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany was not, for their theorists, evidence of philosophical incoherence but a deliberate rejection of liberal legality in favor of a totalized conception of political unity. In Italy, Gentile’s Ethical State asserted itself through decisive acts such as the Leggi Fascistissime, not through parliamentary procedure. In Germany, legal theorists elevated the Führer as the supreme source of authority, treating law as an expression of political unity rather than an external constraint upon it. Whether one judges these developments as catastrophic or coherent, they cannot be dismissed simply for failing to replicate Hegel’s liberal constitutional forms. Dugin’s insistence on doing so exposes less about Hegel than about the unresolved tension at the heart of his own philosophy.

“The Führer is the supreme judge of the nation; his will is the ultimate source of law.”

— Ernst Rudolf Huber, Die Rechtsgestalt des Reichs

“Judge” is not a petty courtroom functionary. Historically, the judge is a sovereign figure, a ruler who forges law through decisive authority rather than by reciting a codified rulebook. From biblical war leaders to medieval monarchs, judgment has meant command, not procedure. What appears here is not Hegel’s Spirit distorted but Hegel’s Spirit purified, the sovereign will fusing universal and particular in a dialectical conflagration, unencumbered by legalistic restraints. This is precisely the tradition of Russian lawlessness that Dugin elsewhere venerates, where the leader generates the legal order rather than being constrained by it. That impulse resounds most clearly in Fascism’s and National Socialism’s contempt for formal juridical limits, not in the anemic pluralism of the 4PT.

Dugin’s critique therefore does not merely fail. It turns inward and tears itself apart. He condemns Fascism for rejecting the very legalistic shell that his own Russian sensibility professes to despise, exposing a deep fissure between his borrowed Hegelian rhetoric and the autocratic impulse he clearly admires. He is no rescuer of Hegel but a poseur, kneeling before a constitutional formalism he claims to reject. His story about German Hegelians such as Binder, Larenz, and Dulckeit allegedly twisting Hegel’s concept of the Volk to accommodate Nazi racial doctrine is equally misguided. The real distortion lay not in race but in their juridical domestication of Hegel, a constraint the Third Reich deliberately shattered in order to release what it understood as the primal force of Spirit. National Socialism did not betray Hegel’s ethical Volk through racialization; it sought to exalt it through sovereign decision, the very logic Dugin’s own celebration of Russian lawlessness should affirm rather than mourn.

While the 4PT drifts amid legal obsession and conceptual hesitation, Fascism and National Socialism present themselves, on Dugin’s own terms, as more consistent heirs to Hegel’s logic of sovereignty and unity, unchained from the formal strictures he clings to in defiance of his professed principles. It is here that Dugin advances his sharpest attack on Nazi racialism, asserting that:

“Biological racism… completely negates the moral nature of the state (a fundamental aspect for Hegel).”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He is not entirely wrong here. In Hegel, the Volk is a spiritual and ethical formation, not a biological category:

“The nation as a state is spirit in its substantial rationality and immediate actuality.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

However, this claim becomes unstable under closer scrutiny, not because Hegel’s concept of the Volk is biological, but because Dugin fails to account for how sovereign will, once detached from the legal mediation he elsewhere demands, functions to constitute a people as a historical and ethical subject. Having already rejected constitutional form as essential, Dugin leaves himself without a coherent criterion for determining when the Volk ceases to be a merely spiritual unity and becomes a concrete embodiment of Spirit. His earlier insistence on constitutional monarchy as the rational form of ethical life thus falters at precisely this point.

Within National Socialist theory, race was not always treated as a crude biological essence but was frequently elevated into a metaphysical or ethical principle through which history, struggle, and collective self-understanding were interpreted. This move did not simply reduce the Volk to biology, nor did it straightforwardly fulfill Hegel’s dialectic. Rather, it represented a reconfiguration of Hegelian categories, in which biology was subsumed into a broader metaphysical narrative of destiny, consciousness, and historical mission. Whether this transformation constitutes a continuation, distortion, or abandonment of Hegel’s philosophy remains a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be dismissed as mere biological reductionism.

Figures such as Alfred Rosenberg illustrate this tendency by framing race as a formative principle of worldview rather than as a strictly empirical category, thereby relocating it within a quasi-metaphysical subject rather than a purely naturalistic one.

“A nation without a myth drifts aimlessly throughout history. Myth gives purpose and meaning to the civilisation. Myth makes a people a nation, a nation a race, and a race a contributor to the world. Myth shapes the race so that the race may fulfill the potential of its individual. The myth makes us conscious that we are a race, and not merely an arbitrary, purposeless, ill-defined conglomerate of men and women.”

— Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of The Twentieth Century

Rather than framing this as a simple betrayal, it can be analyzed as an attempt to render Spirit conceptually explicit within a particular ideological view. Gottfried Feder articulated the Volksgemeinschaft in moral and political terms that could exclude racially defined Germans deemed ethically deficient, thereby prioritizing perceived fidelity to collective norms over lineage alone. Similarly, Robert Ley emphasized inner character and ideological commitment as criteria of belonging, subordinating biology to notions of authenticity and disposition. In this register, biological traits functioned less as fixed essences than as interpretive signs mediated by consciousness and claims about existential authenticity.

Contemporary Nazi sociological writing reflects this tendency. Thinkers such as Friedrich Becker rejected liberal IQ testing as an expression of bourgeois values, advocating instead for concepts like practical intelligence and contextual particularism. These moves sought to redefine evaluation and hierarchy through culturally and situationally grounded criteria, illustrating how biological language was frequently reframed through moral, experiential, and ideological lenses rather than treated as a strictly immutable foundation.

“For Germans, they asked for a measurement of ‘contextual particularism’, ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘actually of the character value of intelligence’.”

— Friedrich Becker, Die Intelligenzprüfung unter völkischem und typologischem Gesichtspunkt

Nazi sociological discourse explicitly rejected this form of materialism, portraying it as an expression of a Western bourgeois mentality fundamentally alien and hostile to the Volk.

“The science of ‘sociology’ has been discredited in Germany because in the past, its name has often covered either ‘inessential thinking’ (Geistreichelei) or the influx of Western thinking hostile to the Volk.”

— Karl Heinz Pfeffer, Die deutsche Schule der Soziologie

The leadership principle, understood as the unification of sovereign decision with the ethical life of the Volk, frames this order as a Sittliches Gemeinwesen, a moral community propelled through historical conflict toward the realization of World Spirit. Within this logic, rigid legal formalism appears as an impediment to dynamic ethical development rather than its guarantor. This creates a tension in Dugin’s position. His frequent valorization of Russian lawlessness and rejection of artificial legality would, in principle, align with an emphasis on sovereign mediation of Spirit. Yet he ultimately retreats from this implication, constrained by the very liberal juridical assumptions he elsewhere repudiates.

From this perspective, National Socialism can be interpreted as an attempted intensification rather than a simple negation of what it took to be Hegel’s Ethical State, treating race as an expression of historical particularity rather than as a purely restrictive biological determinant. Whether coherent or not, this move reflects a dialectical self-understanding that Dugin dismisses too categorically. His rejection rests on a legalistic formalism that sits uneasily with his own broader philosophical commitments, especially his critique of juridical mediation and liberal normativity.

In doing so, Dugin overlooks what fascism understood as its revolutionary core: a conception of history driven by conflict, rupture, and national struggle, elements that resonate closely with Hegel’s account of historical development rather than standing outside it.

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

“Fascism is a revolutionary movement of national rebirth.”

— Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism

The March on Rome in 1922 was not a ceremonial procession but a decisive move that shattered the fragility of liberal governance. Likewise, Nazi Gleichschaltung in 1933 did not proceed through consent or gradual accommodation; it imposed coordination through force, consolidating power and imposing order with uncompromising speed and precision.

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

— Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism

Italian Fascism’s syndicalist origins informed the development of the corporatist state, while in Germany extensive economic controls such as the Four-Year Plan of 1936 redirected market activity toward nationally defined goals, including a rapid expansion of steel production between 1936 and 1939. Within the self-understanding of these regimes, such interventions were framed not as deviations from historical rationality but as moments of dialectical transformation, in which conflict and constraint were presented as engines of collective formation. Concepts developed within Nazi sociology, including Volkwerdung or the “becoming of the people,” reinforced this perspective by rejecting purely material or quantitative measures in favor of a vision of society as a living ethical unity shaped through struggle and mobilization.

“It finds its tasks, its motivation, its moral attitude, and its intellectual foundations in the renewal of the German people through the National Socialist movement.”

— Karl Heinz Pfeffer, Die deutsche Schule der Soziologie

Fascism’s sustained negation of civil society can be read as structurally analogous to the conflictual movement that animates Hegel’s philosophy of history, whereas Dugin’s 4PT arrests that movement, rendering history static rather than dynamic. The contrast is sharp: one emphasizes rupture and sublation, the other tends toward conceptual stasis. Dugin’s characterization of Marxism as a form of “left Hegelianism” contains an element of insight, but it proves insufficient once examined more closely.

“The atheist and materialist Marx discards this ‘idealistic’ moment and proclaims as the first principle what was second for Hegel himself—Nature.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

He is not entirely mistaken: Marx did attempt to invert Hegel’s system, though the success of that inversion remains highly contested.

“The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

— Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1

Dugin inflates this difference into a major break when it is closer to a fissure. Marx’s dialectic of class struggle does not abandon Hegelian teleology so much as secularize it, replacing Spirit with the historical agency of the proletariat. While Marx excises the metaphysical dimension, the underlying rhythm of contradiction and resolution remains recognizably Hegelian. To describe this relationship as a total distortion is therefore an overstatement that overlooks the deep structural continuities between the two systems. Dugin then makes a more dramatic leap, extending this logic to portray Stalinism and Maoism as Hegelian in practice.

“Another aspect is the refraction of left Hegelianism in historical practice. Here, it is essential to consider the historical experiences of the USSR and Communist China separately. Stalinism and Maoism, while formally built on the templates of Marxism and proletarian ideology, represented political systems much closer to Hegelianism itself in practice. Without waiting for the final victory of capitalism on a global scale and the spread of civil society, Soviet Russia under Stalin and then Communist China under Mao began to build post-civil states, where the focus was on state-building, and class theory merely facilitated accelerated (and often forceful) industrialisation and urbanisation of the previously agrarian population.

Thus, Soviet Russia and Communist China followed a path closer to Hegel and more in line with the Third Political Theory than classical Marxism.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

This is better described as an illusion of insight rather than a defensible claim. In Hegel, the state arises through the mediated self-overcoming of civil society via historical development, not through its immediate annihilation by coercive force. Stalinism’s model of forced state construction bypasses this dialectical moment altogether, substituting acceleration and compulsion for organic development. Rather than transforming civil society into a higher ethical form, it simply pulverizes it, leaving no genuine transition to a post-civil society grounded in ethical life.

The Soviet Five-Year Plans (1928–1932) and China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) exemplify this divergence. Both achieved dramatic material mobilization, with Soviet steel output rising from 4.3 to 17.7 million tons by 1939 and Chinese production reaching roughly 11 million tons in 1958. Yet these figures underscore the problem rather than resolve it. They reflect technical and material expansion, not the emergence of an ethical ontology in Hegel’s sense. What is missing is the mediating methods of ethical life that reconciles individual, society, and state. In that absence, the claim that Stalinism or Maoism represents Hegelian practice remains unconvincing.

“The history of the world is the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples has been sacrificed.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of History

Rather than expressing an ethical unfolding, they exemplify the application of unmediated force, in which dissent was eradicated through coercion and society was reduced to a mechanistic, materialist instrument. Against this backdrop, Dugin’s effort to portray these regimes as more authentically Hegelian than fascism is unpersuasive. The empirical record undermines the claim, revealing a reliance on brute power rather than dialectics. In this respect, his argument resembles earlier liberal misreadings of Hegel that abstract selective elements while ignoring the ethical structures central to his philosophy, a tension within Marxist practice laid bare by the scale of violence involved.

Dugin further divides liberalism into two categories, outright rejection and distortion, and intensifies his critique of both. As an example of rejection, he turns to Karl Popper’s dismissal:

“On the other hand, liberalism rejects Hegel entirely—Karl Popper sees Hegel as an enemy of the open society.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

Dugin’s treatment here closely tracks Karl Popper’s critique, yet Popper’s reading of Hegel is itself deeply problematic. Popper famously portrays Hegel as an intellectual progenitor of totalitarianism, treating dialectics as a philosophical mechanism that inevitably culminates in political domination. This interpretation rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegelian freedom. For Hegel, as for Gentile, freedom is not annihilated by the state but realized within it, insofar as individual will is reconciled with the universal through rational ethical life. Popper interprets this reconciliation as coercion because he measures liberty exclusively through the understanding of negative freedom. From within Hegel’s own conceptual vocabulary, however, freedom is actualized, not negated, by participation in the rational state. Dugin adopts Popper’s caricature largely uncritically, despite its clear tension with Hegel’s explicit claims in the Philosophy of Right and with Gentile’s elaboration of ethical life.

A parallel but distinct distortion appears in Alexandre Kojève’s secularized reading of Hegel. Kojève does not reject Hegel outright but reinterprets the dialectic as culminating in the “end of history,” identified with a universal and homogeneous state grounded in liberal capitalism. In doing so, he preserves the formal structure of the dialectic while evacuating it of its metaphysical content, recasting the Absolute as a secular historical endpoint. This move anticipates later formulations such as Francis Fukuyama’s, in which historical conflict dissolves into administrative stability and consumer society. While Kojève bends Hegel’s philosophy significantly, he does not sever it entirely; the dialectic remains operative, albeit redirected toward liberal ends.

This pattern is also evident among figures often labeled “liberal Hegelians.” Thinkers such as Benedetto Croce and Boris Chicherin each modify Hegel in divergent ways, but both retain the central commitment to historical development and the progression of ethical life. Croce famously sought to distinguish what remained philosophically vital in Hegel from what he considered obsolete metaphysics, while Chicherin attempted to reconcile Hegelian state theory with constitutionalism, treating the state as the institutional condition of liberty rather than its negation. In each case, the dialectic is transformed but not abandoned.

Against this backdrop, Dugin’s insistence on a radical rupture between Hegel and liberalism appears overstated. Liberal interpretations may misread or reshape Hegel, but they do not wholly discard the movement of Spirit or the logic of historical development. The distance here is better understood as a crack than a chasm. By contrast, the 4PT abandons the dialectical engine altogether, replacing it with a multipolar schema grounded in Heideggerian Dasein rather than in historical mediation. In claiming to recover a “pure” Hegel uncontaminated by liberalism, Marxism, or fascism, Dugin paradoxically discards the very dynamic of historical development that defines Hegel’s philosophy.

“Such an interpretation could simply be a direct following of Hegel himself, without adapting his theory to any external ideological demands.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

This is no philosophical triumph. It is a hollowed-out construction, stripped of vitality and direction, with its notion of multipolarity anchored in geopolitical pluralism that fractures Hegel’s World Spirit into rival blocs. Rather than preserving historical movement, it disperses it. What follows is therefore not a celebration but a critical excavation, tracing these structural weaknesses in sequence. Dugin’s interpretation hinges on a highly selective reading of Hegel’s description of the Absolute as a “result,” a formulation he employs to sever history from concrete temporal development. On this basis, he attempts to arrest the dialectical process itself.

“Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a result, that it is only at the end what it truly is.”

— Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Dugin then treats this passage as evidence that Hegelian history does not genuinely unfold in time, but instead describes a metaphysical cycle of departure from eternity and return to it, with history reduced to an inward movement of consciousness rather than a succession of concrete historical transformations. The difficulty lies not in the quotation itself, which is authentic, but in the inference Dugin draws from it.

Hegel’s own philosophy of history consistently and explicitly situates Spirit within real, temporal development rather than within a timeless or circular metaphysics. Far from dissolving history into pure inwardness, Hegel repeatedly insists that Spirit realizes itself through determinate historical forms, institutions, and conflicts. Hegel states this without ambiguity:

“World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”

— Hegel, Lectures on The Philosophy of History

This sentence appears in the introductory lectures precisely to clarify what history means for Hegel: a progressive and intelligible process in which freedom becomes ever more explicit through concrete institutions, states, and cultural forms. If history were nothing more than a return to an origin outside of time, this formulation would be incoherent. Progress would dissolve into mere repetition, and the concept of development itself would be emptied of significance. Dugin’s interpretation therefore also clashes with Hegel’s insistence that history moves toward a determinate end through successive temporal stages.

“We have spoken of the Idea of Freedom as the nature of Spirit, and the absolute goal of History.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of History

The passage argues that Hegel understands history as a genuinely temporal and progressive process in which freedom becomes real through concrete institutions such as the family, civil society, and the state. The “goal” of history is not a return to some timeless origin, but the realization of freedom within the world. Dugin’s mistake lies in misreading Hegel’s claim that the Absolute is a “result” as implying that history transcends time. In Hegel, this phrase refers instead to how philosophical understanding grasps the whole only retrospectively, after historical development has occurred. Temporality is therefore essential, not negated.

By isolating this single formulation from Hegel’s broader system, Dugin detaches Spirit from historical development and transforms Hegel’s dynamic philosophy of history into a static, non temporal metaphysics. This contradicts Hegel’s repeated insistence that world history is the progressive unfolding of freedom. As a result, the 4PT empties Hegel’s dialectic of its historical content and replaces it with a relativized, multipolar world that fragments the unity of World Spirit, standing in direct opposition to Hegel’s conception of rational historical culmination.

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Fascism’s totalizing conception of will, whether through Italian corporatism’s attempt to fuse society into a single ethical order or the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft’s binding of the Volk, presents itself as striving toward a unified historical horizon that resonates with Hegel’s demand for coherence and unity in ethical life. By contrast, the 4PT disperses history into disconnected poles, lacking the conceptual force required to integrate its elements into a rational whole. In doing so, Dugin’s philosophy abandons the unifying momentum that gives the dialectic its intelligibility and purpose. Hegel’s philosophy of history is not a polite exchange of ideas but a severe and conflict-ridden process in which unity is forged through struggle.

“The history of the world is the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples has been sacrificed.”

— Hegel, Philosophy of History

Widerstreit, conflict, is not incidental but constitutive. It is the driving force through which Spirit advances and history takes shape. The 4PT offers no comparable dynamic. Instead, it proposes a fragile equilibrium among multipolar actors, privileging balance over struggle and thereby neutralizing the very tension that animates historical development. Fascism, by contrast, understood itself in explicitly revolutionary terms, emphasizing rupture, mobilization, and violence as formative forces in state creation. Episodes such as the March on Rome or the street conflicts surrounding the SA were interpreted not as regrettable excesses but as expressions of historical will hardening into political form. In this sense, the Fourth Political Theory resembles a static tableau, suspended and inert, where Hegelian history demands motion, confrontation, and risk. It is at this point that Dugin attempts to compensate for this absence by anchoring the 4PT in Heidegger’s concept of Dasein.

“Hence, Dasein, the people as a moment of unfolding self-awareness of the Spirit.”

— Alexander Dugin, Hegel and The Fourth Political Theory

But Dugin flattens this concept into an amorphous universalism, emptying it of substance and in the process doing violence to both Heidegger’s existential rigor and Hegel’s dialectical intensity. Heidegger’s Dasein is not an abstract or detached principle hovering above history. It is a situated, concrete being-in-the-world, defined by finitude, thrownness, and historical rootedness, inseparable from the lived existence of a particular people.

“Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein… Dasein is always mine, in each case thrown into a world.”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

For Heidegger, Dasein is inseparable from historical situatedness. It names a people confronting finitude, destiny, and decision within a determinate time and place, not an abstract collective floating above history. In the early 1930s, Heidegger explicitly tied this notion to the concrete experience of a people undergoing historical crisis, interpreting political leadership and collective mobilization as events through which a shared historical existence was disclosed. Whatever one makes of these claims, Dasein in Heidegger’s usage is emphatically not a universal category detached from language, place, and inherited forms of life.

It is precisely this concreteness that is lost in Dugin’s appropriation. His version of Narod within the 4PT lacks the defining features of Heideggerian Geworfenheit, the sense of being thrown into a specific historical struggle with determinate stakes. Instead, it functions as a flexible placeholder designed to accommodate disparate cultures within a multipolar world, from Russia to Iran to China. In doing so, it abandons the existential specificity that gives Dasein its philosophical force and reduces it to a generalized symbol of collective identity.

Historically, Heidegger’s conception of the Volk was embedded in a particular German context and was reinforced by contemporaneous social theorists such as Hans Freyer, who interpreted the “becoming” of a people as a response to what they viewed as the disintegrating effects of Western materialism. Dugin’s geopolitically sanitized adaptation bypasses this context entirely. The result is not a faithful extension of Heidegger’s existential analysis, but a decontextualized abstraction that retains the vocabulary of Dasein while relinquishing its historical and philosophical substance.

“The present is not a transition, but a decision.”

— Hans Freyer, Pallas Athene

Even Heidegger’s own unease with Nazi biological reductionism, most clearly expressed in his critiques of Alfred Rosenberg in the Nietzsche lectures, presupposed a historically rooted and existentially situated Volk, not an abstract or juridically unbound collective of the sort implied by Dugin’s Russian-inflected concept of bezpravie. Heidegger’s Dasein demands authenticity, a confrontation with Being that arises from a people’s lived historical reality. By contrast, Dugin’s formulation dissolves this concreteness, producing a disembodied category that lacks the existential depth required to sustain either Heidegger’s ontology or Hegel’s philosophy of history. More fundamentally, Dugin’s hollowed-out Dasein breaks any meaningful connection to Hegel’s dialectic. In Hegel, the Volk is not a fixed essence but Spirit in the process of historical awakening, driven forward through conflict, negation, and sublation. Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel in his 1934–35 lectures on the Philosophy of Right reflects this dynamic: the people’s overcoming of civil society in the formation of the state is interpreted as an existential act, a historically situated leap into collective self-determination. Dugin’s Narod, by contrast, remains static and passive, positioned as an observer within a multipolar equilibrium rather than as an agent of historical transformation.

By comparison, fascist conceptions such as the Volksgemeinschaft and the corporative state understood themselves as sites of tension and mobilization, in which individual particularity was subordinated to a collective will forged through struggle. Whether one accepts or rejects these projects, they at least operate within a logic of historical becoming. The 4PT does not. Its invocation of Dasein functions as a conceptual placeholder rather than a genuine ontological commitment, leaving Dugin’s appeal to a “pure” Hegel unsupported by either dialectical movement or historical substance. What remains is a selective appropriation of Heidegger that evacuates both thinkers of the very elements, struggle, finitude, and historical determination, that give their philosophies coherence and force.

Conclusions

Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory ultimately represents an intellectual retreat rather than a recovery of Hegelian philosophy. It evades the dialectical vitality central to Hegel’s conception of Spirit and misconstrues the historical and philosophical trajectories it claims to redeem. His assertion that fascism functioned merely as an instrument of capitalism is historically weak, contradicted by the regime’s own ideological declarations, the extensive scope of state intervention exemplified by institutions such as the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, and the prevailing conclusions of comparative scholarship on fascist political economy.

Likewise, Dugin’s categorical dismissal of fascist racial theory as incompatible with Hegel rests on an oversimplified reading. Within National Socialist ideology, concepts such as Rosenberg’s “racial soul,” reinforced by sociological currents that rejected liberal and “bourgeois” evaluative metrics, were articulated as metaphysical rather than merely biological claims. Whether philosophically coherent or not, these formulations were intended to present race as a historical and ethical principle through which collective becoming was interpreted. As such, they cannot be dismissed as simple negations of ethical life without engaging their internal logic and philosophical pretensions.

What distinguishes fascism in Dugin’s account is not fidelity to Hegel but the way Hegelian language was selectively appropriated to legitimize projects of total political unity. Fascist regimes presented the state as an ethical totality forged through struggle and mobilization, a claim that parallels certain formal aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of ethical life while radically diverging in content and consequence. Marxism, by contrast, retained a teleological structure derived from Hegel but reduced historical development to material production and class struggle, excising the spiritual ontology central to Hegel’s system. Liberal interpretations, meanwhile, distorted Hegel by retaining historical development while fragmenting ethical unity, preserving elements of his ontology without its integrative force.

Against this background, Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory abandons historical mediation altogether. Its commitment to multipolarity fragments history into coexisting civilizational blocs, neutralizing the conflict and negation through which Hegel understands Spirit to realize itself. Dugin’s appeal to Heidegger’s 1934–35 lectures on the Philosophy of Right does little to resolve this problem, instead reinforcing his shift away from dialectical history toward a geopolitical policy shaped by Eurasianism. The result is a dehistoricized abstraction that lacks the movement, tension, and development essential to both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophies.

In this sense, the 4PT does not preserve Hegel’s legacy but empties it of its defining features. By replacing dialectical becoming with static pluralism, Dugin detaches Spirit from history and transforms a philosophy of dynamic realization into a theory of geopolitical coexistence. What remains is not a restoration of Hegelian thought but a selective reconfiguration that sacrifices its core commitments to temporality, conflict, and historical determination.