DUGIN AGAINST DUGIN: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory

 

 

The most detailed deconstruction yet published of the theories of Russian political leader and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Dugin has tried to bring together religion, Traditional Metaphysics, sociology and political action in the apocalyptic context of our times, a synthesis that is desperately needed. He has also thrown a penetrating light on a Postmodern Liberal tyranny that, spearheaded by the United States, has morphed into a global leviathan. But in doing so he has relied on intellectual slight-of-hand and mind-numbing contradiction to the point where he can in no way be considered an exponent of the Traditional worldview he claims to represent.

Charles Upton is an exponent of Traditional Metaphysics, a veteran of the U.S. peace movement, a Muslim, a Sufi, and a native-born American. No critic of Aleksandr Dugin is more in sympathy with his essential worldview; none is more outraged by what he’s done with it. That’s why the author has confronted him on every level, in nearly every field that Dugin has addressed, demonstrating how Dugin’s metaphysics are inverted, his view of Orthodox Christianity heretical, his image of Islam twisted, and his flirtation with Satanism all too obvious. No contemporary political theorist has faced the doom of Man more bravely; no social critic has seen the evils of extreme Postmodernism more clearly—yet he can offer no real alternatives, precisely because he has deviated from what René Guénon and Julius Evola called the Primordial Tradition.

To provide context for his agreements and disagreements with Aleksandr Dugin, Charles Upton shines a light on the total re-shaping of religion and the peace movement in the U.S. over the past half-century, the 180-degree inversion of the American Left, the dangers and potentials of the Alt Right, and what true American patriotism might look like in the 21st Century. It presents traditional metaphysics as a liberation from political ideology, expands on Guénon’s “science of Apocalypse,” and recounts the history of the Covenants Initiative, an international peace movement co-founded by the author in 2013.

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Charles Upton is the pre-eminent, living intellectual heir to the great French metaphysician René Guénon. In Dugin against Dugin, Upton offers a lucid appraisal of Aleksandr Dugin and his diverse and often contradictory doctrines from a traditional intellectual and spiritual perspective. He is able to look into the chaotic abyss of Dugin’s evolving philosophical views to offer his readers discernment and clarity. He wields his pen as an astute political observer and commentator to counter Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory, with its amalgam of Fascism, Communism and Liberalism.  This is the most important critique yet published of Dugin and others on the far-right who claim to represent traditional or perennial metaphysics. ~~ Zachary Markwith, author of One God, Many Prophets: The Universal Wisdom of Islam

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There is an epic quality to Charles Upton’s struggle with Alexander Dugin. Like Gandalf awakening to the dark side of Sauron, Upton sees Dugin’s satanic shadow and is horrified. But Dugin against Dugin is not a purely negative or destructive critique. It is also an appreciation of  (as well as warning against) the most intriguing activist political philosopher of our time, by our leading critic of perverted spirituality—what Upton calls the “counter-initiation.” Anyone who wonders what lies beyond the abyss of postmodernism should put Dugin against Dugin at the top of their reading list.  ~~ Kevin Barrett, author of From Yahweh to Zion and Questioning the War on Terror

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Meticulously and methodically, Charles Upton, one of the most important public intellectuals of the 21st century, pierces through Dugin’s body of work like a seasoned surgeon with a scalpel, like a philosopher and social critic with a pen, or like a medieval knight casting a lance at a fire-breathing dragon, the very symbol of Satan. Dugin against Dugin provides a decisive blow to Duginism. One can only hope that it will prove fatal.  ~~ Dr. John Andrew Morrow, author of The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World