Old wine in a postmodern bottle: Aleksandr Dugin's "Fourth political theory" and Aurel Kolnai's War against the West.

The first section reconstructs Dugin's claims to have charted a "fourth political theory" (4PT), which would have broken from "fascism" and "Nazism", the "third political theory" (as well liberalism and communism, the first and second "PTs" respectively). The second section of the paper critically u...

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Publicado en:Studies in East European Thought Vol. 78; no. 1/2; pp. 189 - 209
Autor principal: Sharpe, Matthew
Formato: Literature Review
Publicado: Springer Nature Apr2026
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Old wine in a postmodern bottle: Aleksandr Dugin's "Fourth political theory" and Aurel Kolnai's War against the West.
      aug:
        au: Sharpe, Matthew
        affil: https://ror.org/04cxm4j25 Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Parkdale, Australia
      su:
        Fascism
        National socialism
        Western countries
        Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976
        Philosophers
        Postmodernism (Philosophy)
        Ideology
        Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945
        Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei
        Political science
      sug:
        subj:
          Fascism
          National socialism
          Western countries
          Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976
          Philosophers
          Postmodernism (Philosophy)
          Ideology
          Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945
          Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei
          Political science
      keyword:
        Dugin
        Fourth political theory
        Kolnai
        Nazi thought
        Studies in Human Society Political Science
      ab: The first section reconstructs Dugin's claims to have charted a "fourth political theory" (4PT), which would have broken from "fascism" and "Nazism", the "third political theory" (as well liberalism and communism, the first and second "PTs" respectively). The second section of the paper critically unpacks four Duginian claims to defend this position, despite his avowed recourse to intellectuals who became Nazi Party Members and public advocates of the Third Reich, led by Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. In the third section, we assess whether Dugin's substantive claims hold up about "Nazism" and "fascism", which enable him to present his 4PT as "anti-Nazi/fascist/racist", by recourse to Aurel Kolnai's monumental 1938 work The War on the West: the most extensive anglophone examination of the intellectual sources, texts, and parameters of "the Nazi creed, ... its fundamental principles and its details" (Kolnai 1938: 18). Our argument is that Dugin's "4PT" involves a more or less clever ideological repackaging of the "3PT" in the face of continuing horror at the Nazi's crimes, rather than a novel political theory, based on a "retreat[ing] from the "sub-standard" Hitler to the "eminent" Spengler, Heidegger or Nietzsche" (Lukács 1980: p. 8).
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Literature Review
      src: R
    language: English
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