Alexander Dugin’s modernity, like that of René Guénon but more explicitly, is located in the West. Dugin therefore calls for the end of Western hegemony and the liberation of other civizational spheres. He is not alone in doing this, as has been pointed out in a recent article by Miri Davidson, an assistant professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick. The article is “On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 24 (2025), pp. 469–489, available open access at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00732-x.
Davidson compares the views of Walter Mignolo, an American scholar of Argentinian origin and doyen of the post-Marxist “decolonial school,” with those of Dugin and Alain de Benoist, the French doyen of the “New Right.” The term “pluriverse” was popularized by Arturo Escobar, another member of the decolonial school, as an alternative to the dominant Eurocentric, conquering, capitalist worldview. It is, Davidson shows, comparable to Benoist’s ethnopluralism and Carl Schmitt’s great spaces as adopted by Dugin. Yet there is a difference, she maintains: the decolonial pluriverse is open, “composed of many related and entangled worlds which mingle and coexist with one another,” while the pluriverse of Benoist and Dugin is closed, as “culturally diverse worlds can only live a healthy existence in separation from one another.” This is probably true of Benoist, but not—at least in principle—of Dugin, for whom traditional civilizations can and should combine.
Davidson makes another interesting point, that both versions of the pluriverse imagine hegemony erasing difference. This, she argues, misunderstands the nature of imperialism, which “does not only homogenise and erase difference—which it certainly does on a cultural level—but also constantly and relentlessly produces difference in the form of striated, hierarchical, and often essentialist ethnic, racial, national, and sexual identities.”
An interesting article, which shines a new light on Dugin’s theories, and also (though Davidson does not say this) shows the limits of classification in terms of “left” and “right.”
