What drives history is foundational to any political framework and it is precisely this point which Alexander Dugin grasps in his book The Fourth Political Theory. Identifying the modern epoch as being one driven by three competing political frameworks, he categorizes them as the first political theory, the second political theory and the third political theory; these political theories are liberalism, communism and nazism/fascism respectively. The driving force, or subject, of the first political theory, liberalism, is the individual, or rather, the emancipation of the individual; the second, communism, is class and the class conflict; the third is an odd grouping of the state or race as being iterations of a collective grouping. While the third political theory seems a little unclear, it still retains some value if taken in a loose sense. Dugin takes pains to point out that all three of these political theories contain connected assumptions, not least of which is the belief in linear monotonic progress and directional time conceptions.

One of the key values in Dugin’s framework is the rejection of the monotonous and moronic attempts to delineate “real” liberals who reject the state and believe in private property from “fake” liberals, also known as progressives, who believe the state should govern and tax people to ensure these individual rights. The claimed pure liberal in this sense believes there is such a thing as society without governance, the position implying that the state created individual of modernity is genuinely natural. The progressive meanwhile is less pure in this position, that they tend to be the ones doing the governing is no surprise. All are based on the historical subject of the individual regardless.

Having clearly delineated the three political theories of modernity and their historical subjects, Dugin then tries to lay the groundwork for the fourth political and offers four hypothesis of what the historical subject could be. It is here that things become extremely unclear and in fact pose some serious questions about Dugin’s project. The first hypothesis proposed by Dugin is a compound of the subjects of the three political theories, the second is phenomenological/Husserlian bracketing; the method of epoché, the third is Heidegger’s Dasein, and the fourth is the imaginary. What is drastically missing from Dugin’s theory is the question of why the subjects of individual, class, state and race were the subjects of the three political theories, and this renders his hypotheses for the fourth one barren.

Placing Dugin’s work within the neoabsolutist framework, we can look at the issue afresh and offer a new way to envisage the fourth political theory. Firstly we can begin by making the claim that the historical subject of the individual was the direct result of political conflict occasioned by unsecure power conflict in the western world. This makes the reaction against liberalism of the second and third political theories coherent in Dugin’s scheme. Marxism comes across as a rejection of the symptoms of this process in the name of a more authentic progress which leads to a non-alienated existence, yet it still used the same mechanisms of unsecure power, that of high-low against the middle conflict and divided/bound power. Nazism, a derivative of Marxist thinking, as was Fascism, likewise represents a rejection of the mindless individualisation of liberalism. By placing Dugin’s scheme within the framework of neoabsolutist theory, we have resolved the problem of explaining the origins of these theories. They are all based on an anarchistic conception of man which is derivative of the institutional political conflicts of the imperium in imperio political system. The success of liberalism, despite being the oldest of the three theories, then seems obvious. Liberalism is the purest and most mindless expression of unsecure power, it has no doctrinal binding. Once you reach the end of the road of the concept of class conflict and collective existence, then you will either be out competed in the high-low conflict or go lower yourself. Had Fascism and Nazism survived for any serious length of time it would be likely that they would have succumbed to liberalism just as much as communism finally did because liberalism simply isn’t an ideology based on any reasoned principles, but it is rather a post-facto intellectual accretion of the political system conflicts. Any political system with a constitution (which they all are, a fact often overlooked) is one which declares that the political executive can be bound, in short they were all built on imperium in imperio, which is wherein lies their faults.

For any fourth political theory to arise, it must then do so on the basis of a rejection of imperium in imperio to allow for new patterns of existence to be allowed by authority, because in all political arrangements, whatever occurs is either proactively ordered by authority, or passively allowed by authority. A bounded authority or sovereign is one which promotes individualism as a weapon against all those centers of power beneath it that stand in their way. The international geopolitical value of such a weapon is evident in the spread of revolutions throughout the world. By reaching past the governance structures of enemy states, the US being the unsecure power system par excellence sows the seeds of destruction and chaos abroad, only to reap the resultant chaos. The new elites implanted by the US elites rule in the name of the individual. Of course, this does not need to be spelled out in detail for Dugin as the pattern is observable in the collapse of the USSR and the current color revolutions.

The path from our angle then seems clear; rejection of imperium in imperio has to be the basis of the fourth political theory, but at no point in the fourth political theory does Dugin take into consideration the political structure as such.

More recent writing on the issue seems to indicate that Dugin has taken Heidegger’s Dasein as the tool with which he will attempt to formulate a fourth political theory, but as we have noted above, this misses the institutional process which give liberalism its form, this being the divided political system.

Dugin is also right with regard to his further criticisms of liberalism as having changed humanity. A similar critique can be read into the work of Alaisdair MacIntyre who charges that liberalism has been foisted on society by the state, bringing about through radically unfit institutions the very patterns of behaviour which liberalism claims is inherent in man, the self-interested utility maximizing individual being a great example. Neoabsolutism, however, allows both of these systems to be rooted in a system in which the development of these ideas which these two thinkers are trying to overcome can be explained in practical historical terms. It supplies the artillery for their advance. Such a development would however require overturning both projects from ones which have searched for the sources of modernity in the realm of philosophical exchange, into ones which take the structure of authority as being of paramount importance. The opening through which dialogue can begin with eurasianism would appear to be in the arena of geopolitics, an area in which Dugin demonstrates a keen understanding of the environmental effects of the structures of politics on the philosophical structures of a society. Dugin’s concept of an atlantacist and eurasianist direction of society based upon their geopolitical disposition demonstrates very well that the eurasianist project could take into consideration the political structure itself has a defining influence on the culture of the society in question. There is no obvious reason why such an analysis could not be folded into the neoabsolutist project. If the geopolitical position can feed back into society and impose a gravitational pull on the outlook of the society in question, then what effect would the political structures themselves have, being far more immediate?