Dugin's Traditionalism

An important article on Alexander Dugin, “Alexander Dugin and Western Esotericism:The Challenge of the Language of Tradition” by Jafe Arnold, was been published in Mondi: Movimenti Simbolici e Sociali dell'Uomo in 2019. The article argues in general for the importance of Traditionalism for Dugin’s world view and activities, and then discusses Dugin’s most important mature work on Traditionalism, Filosofiia traditsionalizma (The Philosophy of Traditionalism, 2002).

That Traditionalism is important for Dugin is probably something that few readers of this blog will need to be convinced of, but it is also something that several scholars writing on Dugin, notably Anton Shekhovtsov and Andreas Umland, have disputed. The real interest of the article is in its treatment of The Philosophy of Traditionalism, which no Western scholar has previously written about in any detail. This is where “the Language of Tradition” comes in, as Dugin argues that it is better to think of Tradition as a language than as something that ever existed as historical fact: “There exists not a transcendental unity of traditions, but a transcendental unity of the language of traditions.” Dugin also draws on an unusual source, Herman Wirth (1885-1981), who he cites Julius Evola as identifying as being as important as René Guénon himself. Wirth is, as Arnold argues, generally neglected by Western scholars. His importance for Dugin is in part his work on reconstructing the primordial Arctic Hyperborean language, and in part the opportunity he gives Dugin to trace Russia and Eurasia to Wirth’s primordial arctic civilization.