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Back in April, Johns Hopkins' Center for Economy and Society and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences held a workshop on the political ideologies of Silicon Valley. It was a great event, in large part because it brought together a somewhat disconnected community. People had been thinking about Silicon Valley in history, […]

Call for Abstracts for a Theme Issue of the Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy. Deadline: December 15, 2023

An unterschiedlichen Stellen hier im Blog wurde bereits auf eine Definition von Populismus zurückgegriffen, die ihn als eine "dünne" (oder alternativ auch "thin-centered") Ideologie bezeichnet. Beispiele für diese Stellen sind diese, diese, diese und diese. Bereits 2017 wurde im Rahmen einer Buchvorstellung auf den Populismus als "dünne Ideologie" verwiesen. Dieser Beitrag will sich zum einen der Genese des Begriffes "dünne Ideologie" und zum anderen der Populismus-Definition von Cas Mudde, auf die im Blog zuweilen rekurriert wird, widmen.Der Begriff der "dünnen Ideologie" geht auf Michael Freeden zurück, der zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung seiner Untersuchung, ob Nationalismus eine eigenständige Ideologie ist, am Mansfield College an der Universität Oxford forschte und lehrte. Freeden beschrieb den Nationalismus 1998 in einem Beitrag des Journals "Political Studies" als eine dünne ("thin-centered") Ideologie. Er definierte "dünne Ideologie" als eine Ideologie, die sich willkürlich von breiteren ideellen Zusammenhängen abkoppelt, indem sie bewusst Konzepte entfernt und ersetzt. Die Folge sei eine strukturelle Unfähigkeit zu komplexen Argumentationsketten (vgl. Freeden 1998, S. 750).Im Gegensatz zu dünnen Ideologien hätten eigenständige ("distinct") Ideologien einen einzigartigen Kern und auch die übernommenen Muster seien einzigartig. Vollständige ("full") Ideologien gäben eine recht breite, wenn nicht gar umfassende Palette von Antworten auf die politischen Fragen, die Gesellschaften aufwerfen (vgl. ebd.). Umfassende ("comprehensive") Ideologien böten Lösungen für Fragen der sozialen Gerechtigkeit, der Ressourcenverteilung und der Konfliktbewältigung (vgl. ebd., S.751).Der Nationalismus erfülle die Kriterien einer umfassenden Ideologie nicht und oszilliere zwischen einer eigenständigen dünnen Ideologie und einem Bestandteil einer bereits bestehenden Ideologie (vgl. ebd.). Er erscheine als plastisches Gebilde, in dem sich die noch größere Komplexität seines Wirts ("host containers") widerspiegele. Wenn er gelegentlich versuche, für sich alleine zu stehen, komme seine ideelle Schwäche zum Vorschein (vgl. ebd., S.765).Taggart (2000) schreibt dem Populismus ein "leeres Herz" zu: er habe – im Gegensatz zu manch anderen Ideologien – keine Bindung an Leitwerte. Damit erklärt er, weshalb Populismus häufig als Adjektiv an andere Ideologien angehängt ist: die anderen Ideologien füllen den Raum im leeren Herzen des Populismus (S. 4). Fieschi (2004) führte diese beiden Überlegungen Taggarts und Freedens zusammen (S. 238). Die Unfähigkeit des Populismus, alleine (also außerhalb eines ideologischen Wirtskörpers) zu stehen, führe zu dessen selbstbegrenzender Natur. Dies sei mit der Dünn-Zentriertheit des Nationalismus vergleichbar, die Freeden (1998) als Wesensmerkmal des Nationalismus erkannte. Deshalb betrachtet Fieschi (2004) den Populismus als "politischen Parasiten" (S.236). Die selbstbegrenzende Natur des Populismus (Taggart 2000, S. 118) könne sogar das markanteste Merkmal des Populismus sein (Fieschi 2004, S. 238), und er ist dabei diffus und offen zugleich: diffus, weil er keinen programmatischen Kern hat, und offen, weil er mit anderen umfangreicheren Ideologien zusammenleben kann (vgl. Stanley 2008, S. 99f).Die "chamäleonhafte Erscheinungsform" (Priester 2012, S. 36) des Populismus, die Tatsache, "dass er Verbindungen mit verschiedenen, teilweise gegenläufigen politischen Inhalten eingehen könne" (Decker 2000, S. 38) führt zu grundlegenden Überlegungen darüber, ob der Populismus überhaupt eine Ideologie ist oder ob er dafür zu schwach ist. So wird der Populismus unter anderem als "etwas einer Ideologie Vorgelagertes" (Priester 2012, S. 40) und als Denkstil bzw. Mentalität verstanden (vgl. ebd., S. 41).Mudde (2004) gesteht dem Populismus nicht "das gleiche Maß an intellektueller Raffinesse und Konsistenz wie beispielsweise de[m] Sozialismus oder de[m] Liberalismus" (S. 178) zu. Er sei "nur eine dünne Ideologie, die einen begrenzten Kern aufweist, der mit einem engeren Spektrum politischer Konzepte verbunden ist" (ebd.). Der dünne Populismus könne "leicht mit sehr unterschiedlichen (dünnen und komplexeren) anderen Ideologien […] [wie] Kommunismus, Ökologismus, Nationalismus oder Sozialismus [kombiniert werden]" (ebd.).Später definiert er Populismus als "dünne Ideologie, nach der die Gesellschaft letztlich in zwei homogene antagonistische Lager gespalten ist, "das anständige Volk" und die "korrupte Elite", und Politik ein Ausdruck der volonté générale (Gemeinwillen) des Volkes sein sollte" (Mudde/Kaltwasser 2019, S. 25). Dieser "ideenorientierte[…] Ansatz" ist dabei "nur eine[r] von zahlreichen Zugängen zum Populismus" (ebd., S. 21).Die Verwendung des ideenorientierten Ansatzes bringe dabei folgende Vorteile: seine Durchlässigkeit werde erklärbar (ebd., S. 43); er könne erklären, weshalb unterschiedliche politische Akteure mit dem Populismus in Verbindung gebracht werden (ebd., S. 44); er könne sein wechselhaftes und komplexes Verhältnis (je nach Stadium der Demokratisierung) zur Demokratie erklären (ebd.) und er berücksichtige sowohl die Angebots- als auch die Nachfrageseite der populistischen Politik (ebd.).Abgeschlossen werden soll dieser Beitrag mit einem Hinweis auf die Relevanz der Trennung von Populismus und seinen Wirtsideologien. Eine Verwechslung von Wirt und Gast, dem Populismus, kann dafür sorgen, dass die Auswirkungen des Populismus an den Stimmenanteilen populistischer Parteien überschätzt werden. Ein wesentlicher Erfolgsfaktor populistischer Parteien liegt in ihrer Programmatik und diese kann nicht der Populismus, sondern nur die entsprechenden Wirtsideologie liefern (vgl. Dai 2023).Literatur Dai, Yaoyao (2023): Don't exaggerate the importance of populism. (TheLoop vom 02.08.2023) <https://theloop.ecpr.eu/dont-exaggerate-the-importance-of-populism/> (18.03.2024).Decker, Frank (2000): Parteien unter Druck. Der neue Rechtspopulismus in den westlichen Demokratien, Springer Fachmedien: Wiesbaden.Freeden, Michael (1998): Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?. In: Political Studies 46(4), S.748-765.Mudde, Cas (2004): Der populistische Zeitgeist. In: Müller, Kolja (Hrsg.): Populismus. Ein Reader, Suhrkamp: Berlin, 175-201.Mudde, Cas/Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2019): Populismus. Eine sehr kurze Einführung, J.H.W. Dietz Nachf.: Bonn.Priester, Karin (2012): Rechter und linker Populismus. Annäherung an ein Chamäleon, Campus: Frankfurt.Stanley, Ben (2008): The thin ideology of populism. In: Journal of Political Ideologies 13(1), S.95-110.Taggart, Paul (2000): Populism, Open University Press: Buckingham.

In 1976, Robert Gilpin distinguished three contrasting political economy perspectives: liberalism, Marxism, and mercantilism. Gilpin introduced these International Relations-derived categories as theories and ideologies of political economy, sometimes conceived either as explanatory models or future scenarios. He recognises that the three ideologies 'define the conflicting perspectives' that actors have, but he does not go as far as to theorise how the perspectives may be part of the dynamics of the world economy and generative of its history and future. Gilpin's models, scenarios, and theories are thus mainly cognitive attempts to understand reality from the outside. Since Gilpin's main works, a large number of critical and constructivist International Political Economy (IPE) and Global Political Economy (GPE) approaches have arisen, stressing the constitutive role of ideas and performativity of theories. Many of these studies, however, tend to focus on aspects of contemporary matters or specific issues and fall short of analysing broad historical developments and, most markedly, causation. In a recent book that is coming out as a paperback in May, I develop the idea that the conflicting political economy perspectives are fields that generate the dynamics of the world system.
The post Towards a 'field theory' of global political economy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

To analyze the ideology of Silicon Valley, one can take two approaches. One is to start "from the bottom" and qualitatively examine the writing and influence of key intellectual figures in the community. This method will yield a host of arcane and idiosyncratic ideologies and worldviews, which may or may not be reflected in political […]

One useful way to think about Silicon Valley ideologies is through looking at cryptocurrency. Payment systems like Paypal were as much a part of the Silicon Valley story as platforms like Facebook. They have always been entangled with political aspirations. According to Peter Thiel, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was required reading for Paypal's leaders. They wanted […]

In today’s world, where the pursuit of human rights often finds itself in the crosshairs of political strife and societal division, one fundamental right stands tall as a beacon of hope: religious freedom. It is a right that transcends borders, faiths, and ideologies, deserving not just protection but unwavering advocacy.  Yet, as we champion this […]
The post Promoting Religious Freedom: A Timeless Commitment appeared first on International Republican Institute.

Four volumes containing the minutes of all the lectures delivered by Theodor W. Adorno at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1949 to 1969 have been published in German, edited by Dirk Braunstein under the title "Die Frankfurter Seminare Theodor W. Adornos. Gesammelte Sitzungsprotokolle 1949–1969" (De Gruyter, 2021). These volumes comprise 478 minutes, written by students, from 57 lecture series. See the preview of vol. I and II here & here.Jürgen Habermas served as Adorno's assistant from 1955 to 1959, and volumes I and II include minutes of his participation in seven lecture series. Below is a list of Jürgen Habermas' comments found in volumes I and II (volume, pages):Seminar: Begriff der Ideologie (I) (1956/57) I/468: Referat: "Bemerkungen zum Ideologiebegriff bei Marx" I/482: Referat: "Pareto: Idealtypen menschlicher Handlungsabläufe"I/537f: I/548: IdeologieI/574: I/578: KulturindustrieSeminar: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (I) (1957/58)II/68f: Karl Marx, KlassenbewußtseinII/90: Die NeoliberalenII/138: Ökonomische TheorieSeminar: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (II) (1958)II/146: Friedrich Julius Stahl & Talcott ParsonsII/148-152: Referat: "Arnold Gehlen"Seminar: Kunstsoziologie (1958/59)II/262: Arnold HauserII/262: Die MinisterialenII/275: Georg LukácsSeminar: Ausgewählte Texte zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Soziologie (1960)II/488: Kants EthikII/488: Die Antinomien der reinen VernunftSeminar: Schelling, Die Weltalter (1960/61)II/540-546: Referat: "Absolutum und Geschichte"Seminar: Probleme der Bildungssoziologie (1960/61)II/624-625: Helmutt Becker

As the European Union (EU) steadily approaches the 2024 elections scheduled for June, attention is focused on the likely formation of a coalition between the conservatives (EPP) and the socialists (S&D). However, amidst this political landscape, a chorus of concern is emerging about the EU's tendency towards authoritarianism, underlined in particular by democratic backsliding in Hungary and Italy (Pietrucci, 2023). Projections indicate a potential consolidation of influence by two far-right factions, namely the Identity and Democracy (ID) and European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), alongside the independent Hungarian Fidesz, amounting to a considerable 25 per cent share of parliamentary seats (Wax, 2024). Concurrently, the proliferation of radical ideologies within the EPP poses a significant challenge to the wider European sphere, with ...

The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition"  [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn -  "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."

 I know that I should not even bother to engage with such things, but I saw someone retweet this from Christopher Rufo on X-Twitter. I think that it is revealing about two fundamental different ways of thinking about diversity and differences in a university. First, as Judith Butler states in the video posted below (11:49), that classes in women and gender studies are filled with debate and discussion. This is something that I think anyone who has been in a classroom would probably agree with. I would argue that it extends that it goes beyond gender studies to other subjects of supposed indoctrination such as critical race theory or even Marxism. Christopher Rufo's response to this is to focus not on what happens in such classrooms, he has probably never been in one, but to cite some supposed fact that faculty in gender and interdisciplinary studies are 100% left. I am not sure what he means by that, or if he is including all interdisciplinary programs, but I am going to assume that the left he is referring to is voting patterns, since that is an obsession of many critiques of higher education. 
One could say if one wanted to be generous that what we have is two different ways of thinking of what difference means. Butler focuses on the differences internal to the classroom, the debates and discussion of issues of gender and sexuality, and Rufo focuses on voting, on what happens outside of the classroom. If one wanted to be generous one could call this a differend, in Jean-François Lyotard's sense, a disagreement about the terms of disagreement itself, about what it means for something to be the same or different. That is too generous, however, it is more like a bait and switch. The right's critique of indoctrination in the classroom often uses activity and speech outside of the classroom as a supposed indicator of internal classroom dynamics. Voter registration of faculty is supposed to be an indicator of what and how people teach. Or, to take another example, a faculty members activity outside the classroom, a tweet or protest, is taken to be an indicator of their bias in the classroom. I have even had this happen to me in which my blog, this one, was offered as evidence of my supposed bias in teaching. Just to be clear, if your argument about faculty bias or indoctrination looks to such evidence as faculty voter registration, tweets, political engagement or other activity outside of the class as evidence then you have not proven what you claim to prove. That does not stop people from using this standard. I even know of faculty who have internalized this standard, who curtail their own political activity so as not to appear biased, to be objective. I have heard of political science professors who refuse to register with a party or donate to candidates for fear of appearing biased. Academic freedom and free speech are confused enough to curtail each. The focus on electoral politics also explains one of the ongoing obsessions of the right wing pundit sphere. There is a whole niche publishing market of books arguing that liberalism, Marxism, postmodernism, critical race theory are all THE SAME. I believe that Christopher Rufo even wrote such a book.  Such a claim is demonstrably false from the perspective of the respective histories, ontologies, and epistemologies of different political ideologies. It does, however, make sense on one level and that is the one thing that all these different politics and philosophies have in common is that they are not likely to vote Republican. All of these shoddy, intellectually dishonest, and often anti-semitic books about the secret history of Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory are all attempts to give an intellectual basis to a rather Schmittian distinction of friend versus enemy, to prove that everyone who is against you is actually part of the same conspiracy. That your enemies are enemies of freedom and rationality itself. The focus on voting registration or party affiliation also seems to carry an odd assumption that the political makeup of any activity, any institution, or group, should reflect the overall division of the US. That unless a college major, or discipline, is roughly thirty percent Republican and Democrat, with forty percent unaligned or uninterested in the whole thing, it must be because of indoctrination. It seems odd to suppose that every part of society should function as a microcosm of the society. Would one also assume that all rifle clubs, churches, country clubs, and so on must reflect society at large? Which brings me to the last assumption of this overanalyzed tweet, and that is a causal one. It is assumed that the uniformity of voting or party affiliation, or whatever other paltry measure, of a department of discipline is an effect of what happens in the classroom. That is the supposed indoctrination. As Spinoza argues, however, one of the fundamental aspects of imagination, of what we could call ideology, is confusing effects for causes. I can only speculate here, but I can imagine that maybe the students who sign up for a gender studies course, or women studies, might already have a politics that corresponds with their interest. The same thing could be said for a course on global warming or the history of civil rights or any other issue seen as indoctrination, the students are already educated, already engaged, before they enter the classroom. To put it bluntly, a party that has made ending abortion rights (not to mention in Florida the persecution of gay, lesbian, and trans people) part of its central platform should not be surprised that a women studies or gender studies course has no members in it. All of this obsession with the political make up of different major and disciplines is happening at the same time that one party is openly declaring hostility towards knowledge about science (climate change, Covid), history (slavery), society (gender), and even current events (the 2020 election). I stress open hostility, because the other party, the Democratic Party might declare that climate change is real, but that does not mean it is going to do anything about it--active nihilism versus passive nihilism. Universities seem ill equipped to deal with this assault, maintaining their standard neutrality towards "both sides" of any issue, but this neutrality towards politics on part of the institutions of knowledge is being confronted by a politics that is anything but neutral with respect to knowledge. 

Law in a Transnational Context
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Series of Lectures from January to April 2011

The world of traditional legal theories has become too small. It seems too small for a law that is more and more losing its old territorial, political, and national bonds and that becomes part of worldwide social and economic processes. Law of this kind tends to statelessness. It is no more focussed on a territory, national state, or a local community, but constitutes itself through the communicative networks of highly specialised discourses. The production of law shifts from the nation state to the specific dynamic of social systems which conventional terms and criteria of politically orientated legal theories hardly touch upon. Terms like "constitution", "legislation", "unity", "hierarchy", "sanction" etc. become uncertain. Nowadays law is at home in a world that is fragmentary, that has no centre, no middle point, or unity. Legal pluralism dominates the scenery.

"Globalization" is the common word for this phenomenon, which is accompanied by a review of traditional concepts of law, of their premises and implications. Legal history is constantly confronted with phenomena of this kind, especially when processes of global interlacing beyond territorial and national boundaries are being examined, or when societies with a plurality of norms are being put into perspective.

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence at the Goethe-University Frankfurt will start in the winter term 2010/2011 a series of lectures dedicated to historical paradigms and theoretical concepts of such processes. Scholars from different countries and with strong expertise in theory and history of law, in sociology and political sciences will hold lectures about chosen subjects.


Lecture: Wo bleibt der Dritte im Rechtspluralismus?
13. January 2011
Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther, Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften und Rechtsphilosophie der Uni Frankfurt

Lecture: Domesticating Modernities: Transfer of Ideologies and Institutions in Southeastern Europe
3rd February 2011
Prof. Dr. Diana Mishkova, Director of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS)

Lecture: International Law in a World of Empires: Constructing a Global Prohibition Regime in the Long Nineteenth Century
7th March 2011
Prof. Dr. Lauren Benton, History Department, New York University

Lecture: The New Global Law. A Historical Perspective
14th April 2011
Prof. Dr. Rafael Domingo Oslé, Faculty of Law, Universidad de Navarra

If nothing else, SB 262 by
Republican state Sen. Valarie
Hodges would inhibit in Louisiana racial division and hatred.

The bill, currently
passed out of the Senate into the House of Representatives, would add to
the state's Parental Bill of Rights that schools "shall not discriminate
against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or
destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on the child's race or
national origin." This addresses the use of critical race theory, or the idea
that racism is pervasive in all societal institutions shaped historically by,
if not currently dominated by, people of Caucasian ancestry, as the
foundational tool by which to shape instruction.

Similar
to Marxism, CRT bases itself on a series of unfalsifiable, if not empirically
unverifiable or logically suspect, propositions that if questioned
automatically connotes racist actions (or, if the analyzer is non-white,
axiomatic of a false consciousness), making the whole enterprise intellectually
lazy and devoid of true scholarship. It increasingly has become a tool by
those ideologically compatible with its policy aims – strong government action
to level differences in outcomes of resource allocations – for instruction from
the academy on down.

As an approach to understanding the distribution of
political power in a society, it warrants scrutiny and study as long as this
occurs in a critical and comparative fashion in the instructional environment.
When made foundational in instruction, however, it subverts the entire process
of education as a search for truth by elevating faith over skeptical inquiry
and becomes nothing more than neo-racism posing as anti-racism.

That by itself disserves children by depriving
them of the opportunity to learn factual knowledge and then engage in critical
thinking using it. And, quite ironically, applying the policy preferences of
CRT actually would
undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing poverty and
inequality across all racial groups, providing another reason to ban its
use as a foundational instruction strategy.

But the bill's language probes to a deeper and
more sinister implication of using CRT foundationally: it spawns divisiveness, leading
to hatred, then into violence. We
only need review recent history not among non-whites, but central Europeans,
to see a demonstration of how the principles of CRT produce this perversion. In
the 1990s, ethnic conflict largely but not exclusively driven by Serbian
nationalists operating under an ideology of victimization brought war and
strife to the Balkans.

This nationalism, spawned over a century, had
mutated into a blanket indictment of certain non-Serbian ethnic groups. Identically
to tenets of CRT, it taught that a certain ethnic group, Serbs, had faced systemic
discrimination that culminated over the years that granted them special
victimhood status awarding moral status to their claims of group oppression.
Indeed, movement leaders invoked imagery and symbolism from past American
racist policy outcomes when explicating their ideology.

Shared tenets aren't difficult to ascertain: glorifying
the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative (the 1619
Project), attributing sinister ethnically-based motivations and ideologies
to political opponents (the refusal of whites to become "woke" and the denigration
of non-whites on that side of the debate as captured), and calling opposition
and criticism "violence," in order to legitimize future actual violence (propagating
policies such as defunding the police as a reaction to alleged brutality and
disproportionate detainment specifically aimed at non-whites). Sadly, these
tenets constructed a narrative that inspired many to engage in sustained,
violent ethnic conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Regrettably, at its core CRT promotes tribal
hatreds. To teach children fundamentally that their race or national origins
automatically set them at odds with those who are different – unless, of
course, racial preferencing is instituted to redress (under the theory that "[t]he
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy
to present discrimination is future discrimination") – not only perverts the
idea of education, but fuels a dangerous powder keg if allowed to expand and
persist. SB 262 does its part to prevent this.

After the pandemic and the reopening of borders, the debate over globalization returns. On the one hand, democracy and global institutions show they enjoy robust bad health. On the other hand, the temptation of retracting into the politics of blocs reemerged.A major recent event has
been the summit meeting of the Group of 20 in Indonesia, which is the third
largest democracy in population in the current world, and one of the most
recent ones. An extremely territorially and culturally diverse country, Indonesia
has had a multiparty democracy for nearly twenty years and has become the best
example of the compatibility of democracy and Islam.Next year, the G-20 summit
will take place in India, the world's largest democracy, three times larger
than the European Union and four times the United States. The endurance of
democracy in India and its sustained economic development is the biggest
success story in many decades. Meanwhile, the second and
fourth largest democracies are also on good stand: the United States, now free
of Trump, and Brazil, freed of Bolsonaro.Despite these global
achievements, some voices seem to miss the Cold War and call for self-isolation
of the West. A few weeks ago, I went to a lecture by
Canada's deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland at
the Brookings Institution in Washington. Freeland, who was at the G-20 finance
meeting just before the summit, held that democratic countries should stand
together to protect their economic interests and block non-democratic countries
on transnational trade and other economic exchanges. The new blocs would be
fostered by "friend-shoring," that is, trading only with political friends. CLICK Very soon, Rana
Foroohar from Financial Times, who was also at the Brookings
lecture, saluted the idea enthusiastically while promoting a new book. She
holds that we are heading towards "a new, post-neoliberal paradigm in which
values become a more important consideration in economic policy decisions." The
West should abandon globalization and revert to trade blocs between nations
sharing certain political values and geopolitical interests. CLICK There
have been immediate responses in defense of globalization. In a sharp critique, economist Branko Milanovic, one of the
best students of economic inequality in the world, has noted that "trade
blocs have existed before: there were called UK imperial preferences, Japan's
co-prosperity zone, Grosse Deutschland's Central European area, Soviet Council
for Mutual Economic Assistance. Now, we are to believe that 'friend-shoring' is
somehow different. It is not. It is just mercantilism under a new name and
trade blocs in a different costume." He concluded that if the West abandons
globalization, it would be delusional "to believe that the rest of the world
can just be flipped on the drop of the hat, and would not notice the enormity
of the ideological change that this implies." CLICKMartin Wolf, chief
economic commentator of Financial Times, has also reacted
forcefully: "Some seem to imagine a relatively peaceful 'decoupling' of
economies until recently stitched so tightly together. But a more destructive end to globalization is likely… Under
the leadership of psychopaths and the influence of nationalism and other
dangerous ideologies, we are capable of grotesque follies and horrific crimes…
We are not headed toward a benign localism but towards a negative-sum rivalry.
Our world may not survive a virulent bout of that disease." CLICKThe
success of the G-20 meeting has offered a strong positive response to the
discussion. For
the first time since he is the US president, Biden has met Xi Jinping and they
have agreed on "working together to solve global challenges" and to prevent
economic and military wars. The war-mongering Russia has been isolated, and
Putin has not even dared to attend the meeting.The G-20 is particularly
important right now to make the accords among the wealthiest democracies
grouped in the G-7 extended to the rest of the world. We should keep in mind
that the G-7 countries encompass about 45% of the gross world's product (in
nominal terms) but less than 10% of the world's population. The globalization push
for democracy, peace and prosperity must be for everybody or it may crash down.    A few days later, the climate summit in Cairo has shown the
current limits of international cooperation. It has addressed the consequences
of climate change with the creation of a fund to help the victims of disasters,
but not the causes, due to disagreements between the coal and oil or gas
producing blocs.                                                                                         Thus we have been able to observe once
again that the biggest governance problem in the world today is that there is
more economic, health and climate globalization than political globalization.     There was a comparable process of globalization with glaring deficits of global institutions at the beginning of the 20th century. In those years, the ratio of foreign trade to domestic products was similar to today's levels, communication expanded through telegraph and telephony, people traveled without passports...    As it was by then, the alternatives to globalization are blocs, nationalisms, tariffs, borders, racism, xenophobia, and sovereignty wars. Ultimately, as it was in 1914 and as we are seeing in Ukraine, the alternative to further political globalization is war.                    My own contribution can be found in my book with Ashley Beale, Democracy and Globalization. Anger, Fear, and Hope. CLICKI presented an updated summary at a recent weekend conference in Madrid about "Economic governance, regulation, and justice", which will be collected in a forthcoming book. CLICK In Spanish and Catalan in La Vanguardia CLICK

Alexander Dugin on
Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of
Multipolarity







IR has long been regarded as an
Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look
beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk
#51, Theory Talk
#45), India (Theory Talk
#63, Theory Talk
#42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk
#10) and elsewhere for non-Western
perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have
paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of
international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical
theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker
Alexander Dugin, founder of the International
Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important
influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar
World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out
Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.




Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version




What, according to you, is
the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your
position within this debate or towards that challenge?



The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional.
In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that
there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes
right away.



The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school
– liberalism.



If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on
the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and
methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR
dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially
forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other
hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles,
might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a
broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for
the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential.
This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that
reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who,
being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make
themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a
vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which
are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.



The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the
English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and
even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the
popularity of Wallerstein (Theory
Talk #13) and other
versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical
version of classical, positivistic IR theories.



The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs.
positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have
gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been
successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all
so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism,
post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly
scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed
to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new
post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological
structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and
fundamental.



The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international
relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his
critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an
entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the
structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying
its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from
the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built,
including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity
is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an
entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into
account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there
are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.



The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one,
is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a
Multipolar World was developed in Russia,
a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR
as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a
Multipolar World.



The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually
regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological
potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps
partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves
about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential
contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and
semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.



If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an
extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time,
only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and
that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All
the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of
the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly
deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third
totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about IR?    




I began with Eurasianism, from which I
came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the
British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long
time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and
applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of
geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in
contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I
was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which
forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR,
the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested
in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to
post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory,
neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came
to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself,
precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of
Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.





In your opinion, what would
a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?



In
our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity
with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of
the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line
Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic
shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one
to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory
Talk #35)
theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very
useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with
deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is
a great danger of overlooking what is most important.



Another very important competence is
history and political science. Political science provides generalizing,
simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only
put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place,
although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the
economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly
recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics
and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their
significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an
instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are
rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out
how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is
required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics
(Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of
the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they
regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.





What
does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?  



This is the most important thing. The
entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant
already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the
body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger
identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with
becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities,
thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is
here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To
think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in
space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is
preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This
is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of
Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph
of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way
[topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this
perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is
necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really
step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in
Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva],
which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed
in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.





Geopolitics
is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing,
from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current
geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet)
geopolitics?



It is an entirely new form
of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s,
and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of
geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few
short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to
geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the
geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group).
At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and
associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that
formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without
reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff
of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then,
geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline
is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or
pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which
took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations
of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had
published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated
as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new
textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which
together with The War of Continents
are the results of work in this field, along four axes. 





In
your book International Relations, not
yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a
distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar
World—and how is it different from classical realism?



In order to be understood
and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World
seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same
thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists.
However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one,
but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the
will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account
but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and
hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of
one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of
subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory
nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern
understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to
take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them
'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large
spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects,
we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in
the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior,
etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling
liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the
difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world,
but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about
regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders.
Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the
authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by
'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity,
including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites,
civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc.
That is the general picture.





Your
theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and
social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of
neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony
'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene
Guenon, Julius
Evola), cultural
anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think
that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it
designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short,
what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?



According to Hobson's
entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism.
There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism
(with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological
racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the
basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of
societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure).
Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his
ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is
impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves
deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the
example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of
that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World
will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those
scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western
identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right
(nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism
of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism,
and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same
universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I
appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second
(communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I
call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a
radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of
Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.



Traditionalists are brought
in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the
plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern)
cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is
grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable
and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and
coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.





What
is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a
Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches
in the field of IR?



I spoke a little about this in the
response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for
getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the
Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The
West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three
political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism).
But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that
it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in
the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these
three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no
parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the
West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that
this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This
episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the
West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are
needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third
totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which
are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the
necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the
correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is
the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the
domain of political theory.





Is
IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a
reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia
specifically Russian?



IR is a Western scientific discipline,
and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the
West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR
is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in
relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core
of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and
more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English
science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to
Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As
with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will
to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely
Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in
IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of
realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big
role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood
the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first
textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they
were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR
in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian
there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking,
and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated,
aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I
try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope)
proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.





Stephen
Walt argued in a September
article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet
Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally
supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?



There is something to that. Today, Russia
thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is
right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political
Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale
ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism,
globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a
nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the
Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its
significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in
forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this
conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the
West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point
force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative
alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new
ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not
simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global
challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand
this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it
seems he doesn't.





Vladimir
Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and
deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to
retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and
justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary
interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same
time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired
to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this
assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international
situation?



These are true, but rather
naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own
interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal
norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the
will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse.
Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The
West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that
everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition.
And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that
there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by
centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the
conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic
objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice
will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word
in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not
objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is
black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine
it.





How
does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage
better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that
do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?



Interesting question. Russia's behavior
internationally is determined today by the following factors:



First,
historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a
Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this
factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the
'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this
from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into
consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society
and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia
and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');



Second,
the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical,
pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by
neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its
leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization,
and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR
models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from
sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential
because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).



But if an opponent underestimates you,
you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by
the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.





In
the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either
lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence,
deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between
power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia
with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?



I think that in our case both positions
have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do
not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and
sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility
and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first
time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not
meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both
comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the
authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in
particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.





If
your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal
principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from
the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism',
like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization
misleading?



Accusations of fascism are simply a
figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary
liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in
his book The
Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of
liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism
of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat
more complex, but George
Soros,
who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is
content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so.
But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political
Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and
opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has
no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while
it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I
think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third
totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be
sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but
in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be
more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist,
although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me
as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses
a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the
simpler it is to fight with him.





Does
technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the
geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view
or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly
perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?



Technological development does not at all
abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea
are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a
clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of
processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a
certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word
astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship.
Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea.
Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land
strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason
for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and
technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration
the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the
proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into
the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its
downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is
Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and
algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources
and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.





You
have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works
into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?



I recently completed the
first release of my book Noomachy,
which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and
hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has
its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and
dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is
why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American
to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the
Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them.
So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French
philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of
himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but
without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the
depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical
texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and
James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are
Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are
Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both
those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war;
hence, Noomachy, the war of the
intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates
that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we
most often underestimate.





Final
question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is
Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?



Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to
which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and
interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar
World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it
resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural
anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is
that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the
same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other
civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse
and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire
is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history
in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today,
the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism
in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate,
although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of
the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in
the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty,
which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory
Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For
precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every
American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that
he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of
myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more
humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.





Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher,
the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the
imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory,
international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available
in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My
War and the multi-volume Noomachia:
Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory,
Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed
From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of
Another Beginning.






Related links





Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube)
TheFourth Political Theory website (English): 
Evrazia.tv
(Russian) 
Evrazia.tv
(English) 
Geopolitics.ru
(English version)
InternationalEurasian Movement (English version)
Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)

Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version