Wendell Berry (1934–2026)

 

Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet, and (perhaps) soft Traditionalist, died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. See earlier post and subsequent discussion here.

Happy twentieth birthday, blog!

Hard to believe, but this blog is now twenty years old. The first post was dated June 14, 2006, and explained that it was time for the addenda I had been publishing on the companion website to Against the Modern World to take a new form. June 15, 2026 saw the first real post: a book announcement, welcoming Jean-Pierre Laurant’s René Guénon, les enjeux d'une lecture. Since then there have been 536 more posts, an average of about two a month, and 1,209 comments.

The blog has become more popular over time. It took nine years to reach 250,000 page views (in 2015), two more years to reach 500,000 page views (in 2017), six years to add a further 500,000 page views and reach 1,000,000 (in 2023), and finally three years to reach 2,000,000 (in 2026). This reflects both increased interest and the fact that as the years have passed there have been ever more pages for an interested visitor to view.

Over these twenty years, the blog’s audience has become more global. From 2006 to 2015, 45% of visits came from the US, UK and Canada, and from 2006 to 2017, 59% from the US alone. By 2023 the US share had fallen to 38%, and to 37% by 2026. Non-US interest came initially from the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and Brazil, then (by 2017) especially from the UK and Russia, a pattern little changed in 2023. By 2026, Singapore came in second place after the US, followed by the UK, Brazil, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and Russia. Why the new interest in Singapore and Hong Kong? If you know, please leave a comment.

Dugin as viewed from the American Left

Bruce Lerro, an adjunct college professor of psychology who describes himself as a libertarian communist, has written a long article on Alexander Dugin’s concept of the ethnos, which you can read here.  It is entitled “From Shaman to Heroes, From Prophets to Traders: Alexander Dugin’s A Russian Eurasian Perspective on Ethnogenesis.” Interestingly, it was published on a website called Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Lerro asks the question “Why Should You Care?” and answers: 

For socialists, a knowledge of the history of human societies is vital to understand the dynamics of why societies arise and break down. As historical beings we train ourselves to accept the torch of existing social conditions and pass the torch to the next generation to help plant better social conditions. The Atlanticist world of the West is falling apart. The Asian world is rising. While Western anthropology and macrosociology has made some important contributions it has been relatively neglectful of steppe people and has generally looked skeptically on the value of ethnicity and other forms of attachment. This is because capitalist societies need individuals, not groups to be the lowest unit for its economic advertising. Dugin’s work, as shown in this article, supports both ancient forms of attachment and the place of steppe people in social evolution. In the extent to which socialists wish to be Eurasian polarists, we owe it to the world and ourselves understanding of their picture of how societies evolved.

In principle Dugin sees himself as neither left or right, but in generally his reception in the West has very much been on the right, and Lerro's article was republished on Countercurrents (here), which is generally described as alt right. What is interesting is to see the American left taking an interest.

Russian Conservatism and Alexander Dugin

Many articles in an important and very long special issue on “Aleksandr Dugin and Contemporary Russian Conservatism” in Studies in East European Thought (volume 78, issues 1-2, 2026) deal with Dugin. The special issued is edited by Jeff Love (Northwestern) and Marina F. Bykova (North Carolina State University).  Given the number of articles, this will be a long post.

Four articles look at Dugin's use of Heidegger, two articles at his Fourth Political Theory, one at his use of Armin Mohler's “conservative revolution,” and one at his apparent abandonment of Eurasianism. Five look at his impact abroad: in the West, in the Middle East, in the Global South, in China, and online. One looks at Queer theory (see earlier post here), and one at apocalypticism. Only one focuses on Dugin’s Traditionalism, which many of the the rest ignore, and that is Mark Sedgwick, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist roots,” discussed here. 

The same issue also contains five short papers about the meaning of conservatism, fruit of a round table on this issue. Most do not mention Dugin, but all are interesting. The paper that does mention Dugin, Artemy Magun's “Conservatism and the dialectic of ideology” (here), notes that conservativism in Russia has become more radical, with Dugin as the latest in the line from Fyodor Dostoevsky through Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilyov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Magun summarizes this conservatism as “aggressive counterrevolution, the unique path and values of Russia as a culture and ‘civilization’ (‘Sonderweg’), traditionalism in contrast to moral experimentation, the capitalist materialism of the West, and to the emphasis on the positive, good, and normal models as opposed to ‘Western perversity.’” It is, he argues, a coherent idea. He also notes that “the moral panic that the specter of a serious conservatism… induces in some English-language literature is counterproductive.”

For Heidegger, Jeff Love, in “Dugin’s masks,” (available here) shows how Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger is combined with Plato to produce a “philosophy of chaos.” It ends by identifying contradictions between Dugin’s philosophy and his political action. Maja Soboleva, in “From the ‘Russian idea’ to the ‘Russian World’” (available here, open access) looks at the development of the “Russian idea” as a basis for Russian national identity, and the role of Dugin in introducing Heidegger into later conceptions of the Russian idea, which in turn “correlates with the myths that later found their way into Putin’s catalog of traditional values.” These are characterized as “a peculiar mythologized metaphysical pseudo-Heideggerian realism.” The presence of these ideas in Putin’s “catalog,” as Soboleva does not say, might be one basis for answering the heated question of Dugin’s real influence in contemporary Russia. Gregory Fried, in “'Something wicked this way comes': the neo-fascist mobilization of Martin Heidegger in the Nationalist International” (available here) deals, as the title says, with the uses of Heidegger by the Global New Right, not just by Dugin, to whom one section is devoted. Finally, Daniil Koloskov, in “Russian Dasein: Dugin’s reading of Heidegger and the possibility of 'cultural Dasein'” (available here) argues that Dugin's reading of Heidegger "runs counter to the basic meaning of Heidegger’s early project and remains non-Heideggerian in spirit. All useful and interesting. 

For the Fourth Political Theory, in “Old wine in a postmodern bottle: Aleksandr Dugin’s ‘Fourth political theory’ and Aurel Kolnai’s War against the West” (available here, open access), Matthew Sharpe argues that the Fourth Political Theory is just a revised version of Nazism, as understood by the liberal Austrian philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973). Ronald Beiner, in “Alexander Dugin: philosopher or ideologue?” (available here) also argues that the Fourth Political Theory is no more than rebranding. Beiner made the same argument in his chapter on Dugin in his 2025 boook on  Radical Right Ideologues in the Age of Trump: Heralds of Nihilism. I myself am not so sure, nor am I sure that Kolnai's definition of Nazism is the best one to use.

Michael Meng, in “Dugin’s apocalypticism: Western or Russian?” (available here, open access) looks at classic models of apocalypticism from Thucydides and Plato to Augustine and Hitler, and concludes that unlike these models Dugin is most concerned with averting the destruction of Russia’s “mythic position between East and West.” Meng does not mention the Traditionalism that informed Dugin’s original and early interest in the apocalypse, and I am not sure his conclusion is entirely right. 

Emmanuel Faye’s “A strategy of exoneration? Armin Mohler, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin on the ‘conservative revolution’, National Socialism, and the SS” (available here) is only partly devoted to Dugin, as it deals at length with Mohler’s construction of the alleged “conservative revolution” and its reception by de Benoist before he gets to Dugin. Part of the point of Mohler’s construction was to exonerate “a whole host of National Socialist authors, beginning with Carl Schmitt,” and including Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger. The main difference between Dugin on the one hand and Mohler and de Benoist on the other was that, unlike them, Dugin “was not concerned to distance himself from Nazism at any price,” and in fact praised the Waffen SS as “a kind of intellectual oasis at the heart of the National Socialist regime.” Faye is one exception to the general rule that articles other than Sedgwicks’s “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist Roots” ignore Traditionalism, as he notes in passing that Dugin was a Traditionalist and that his Fourth Political Theory draws on Guénon as well as Jung and Heidegger. 

It is Nicola Guerra who proposes that Dugin has abandoned Eurasianism, in "From neo-Eurasianism to Trumpism: Aleksandr Dugin and the making of conservative internationalism" (available here). If it has happened, this would be a major change since, as Guerra says, it is Eurasianism that brought Dugin to public attention in the first place. The argument is based on recent comments by Dugin, and also  on the fact that his English-language social media activities have recently mostly abandoned classic Eurasian themes and now repost a lot of MAGA content. Guerra also points out that Dugin has concede that the project of Eurasian integration in the post-Soviet space has filed, despite President Putin’s best efforts.

In 2025 Dugin’s Facebook channel announced that “Trump clears the path towards multipolarity. Aleksandr Dugin maintains that Trump’s UN speech has destroyed the illusion of a liberal world order.” In my own view, this is not so much the abandonment of Dugin’s earlier positions as a note that what he had so long railed against—the hegemony of monopolar American liberalism—has fallen. Instead, “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi embody ancient civilizations [Confucian and Vedic] that now assert their sovereignty within their own value systems.” Just as Dugin had hoped for years.

Guerra writes “Dugin has not merely abandoned the neo-Eurasianist framework and its attendant geopolitical logic, but has also realigned his ideological orientation toward the American Alt-right, illiberal conservatism, the Alt-lite, and the Bannonite ideological milieu—positions that are fundamentally at odds with the theoretical and strategic premises underpinning his earlier neo-Eurasianist corpus.” He refers to an earlier article of his, "The Russian-Ukrainian war has shattered the European far right: The opposing influences of Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin," in European Politics and Society 2024, available here. In this he argues that although many observers lump Bannon’s and Dugin’s ideologies together, they are in fact profoundly different, as “Bannonian traditionalism is markedly Christian and identifies Islam as an enemy… [while]  Dugin’s traditionalism, which can in no way be separated from his project of creating a Eurasian empire, is instead polyreligious.” Bannon’s perspective, he further argues, is ethnic, perhaps even white supremacist, while Dugin’s is multi-ethnic.

This is true, if one accepts Guerra's take on Bannon, except that in my view Dugin’s Traditionalism can and should be separated from his Eurasian project. Endorsement of Trump as the person who destroyed unilateral American power and the hegemonic liberal project does not constitute an acceptance of Christian white supremacy or an abandonment of multi-ethnic perennialism.

Finally, for reception, several articles are co-written with Marlene Laruelle.

The West is covered by Erik Piccoli in "The Dugin network: multipolarity, traditionalism, and transnational liaisons in the West" (available here). He looks at France, where Dugin's earliest contacts were, and then at Spain, Italy, and the US. He focuses on networks, not thought, though he does concede that the publishing house Arktos, which translates Dugin's works on all topics, may actually be more important than any ot the networks, though of course French, Spanish and Italian networks also publish translations. In terms of networks, he sees Dugin as "an intermediary between the Russian state and sympathetic groups abroad." He argues that what has mattered most since the invasion of the Ukraine is Dugin's geopolitics, as a result of which he appeals to pro-Russian groups irrespective of other factors. It is about multipolarity (the alternative to American unipolarity) more than Traditionalism. Piccoli identifies individuals and small groups in each country that have welcomed Dugin and promoted him and his work.

Four countries in the Global South are discussed by Marlene Laruelle and Arsenio Cuenca in "Russia’s metaphysical diplomat: Dugin’s ideological circulation in the Global South" (available here). They are India, Brazil, Argentina, and West Africa. In all four countries Dugin has been well received, in India by the government (it seems) as a semi-official representative of Russia, in Brazil by the rightist group Nova Resistência (New Resistance), in Argentina by the Peronists. In these three cases the interest is mostly political. In West Africa, however, it is Traditionalism that matters, as Dugin's strongest relationship is with Kémi Séba, a widely popular Pan-Africanist who not only credits Guénon for his conversion to Islam but also incorporates Traditionalism in his political and cultural theory. More work remains to be done on Séba.

China is a different matter, covered by Marlene Laruelle and Victor Liu in "Civilizational dissonance: Alexander Dugin and the limits of Sino-Russian ideological convergence" (available here). This is the most political reception of all. It started in 2018, when Dugin was invited to China and promoted as a lecturer by prominent policy thinkers like Zhang Weiwei and Wang Wen, who presented him as the “philosopher of multipolarity.” He was then received enthusiastically on social media in 2022 as China and Russia became closer following the invasion of Ukraine, and Chinese media started to present the war as against Western positions. The following year, however, opinion turned, mostly because Dugin’s earlier and somewhat Russo-centric and hostile positions on China in his Geopolitics became known, and to some extent also because his “metaphysical worldview” were discovered and rejected.

For the Middle East, Kamal Gasimov and Marlene Laruelle contribute “Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world” (available here, open access). The article in fact covers Turkey, the eastern Arab world, and Iran, not the Muslim world as a whole, but the countries it does cover, it covers well and in detail. Traditionalism is most important for Dugin's reception in Iran, but “his elaboration of a doctrine deeply rooted in esoteric, occultist, and eschatological traditions as well as geopolitics” matters everywhere, “allowing him to translate current transformations of the international order into a metaphysical language.” Beyond this, Dugin's view of the West fits comfortably with well-established Middle Eastern experiences of Western imperialism and his anti-modernism fits well with equally well-established Middle Eastern views of the West as a source of atheism and moral depravity. This matters more, in the view of Gasimov and Laruelle, than the details of his more recent political theory, though of course general views of political relations with Russia also matter. It is going too far, however, to say that Dugin is not “an exporter of a coherent doctrine but... a cipher through which diverse publics negotiate their own ideological positions vis-à-vis liberalism and the West.” His Traditionalist-based critique of the West and modernity placed in opposition to the esoteric is, in fact, a coherent doctrine, and Dugin is no more a cipher than any other philosopher.

A final article on reception is “Dugin as digital influencer: symbolic authority and media ecosystems” by Marlène Laruelle and Dusan Bozalka, available here. This is one of the most interesting articles in the special issue, arguing that what matters is not so much Dugin’s thought or even its institutional connections and backing but the way it circulates online. This approach is a new idea for some, but has become well accepted among others. The article examines Dugin’s online presence using variously technically sophisticated tools, looking at his Telegram channels and his major websites. This analysis shows us Dugin’s thought, or at least his online messaging, from an entirely new perspective. It also shows where this online messaging is received: most of all among Russian speakers, in the Francophone world, Latin America, the Anglosphere, and also among readers of Serbian, Italian, German, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Finnish, and Ukrainian.

The major themes of Dugin’s online messaging, Laruelle and Bozalka find, are multipolarity, “which calls for the decline of Western hegemony and the establishment of a world order in which sovereign civilizations coexist on equal footing, each maintaining its own spiritual and cultural integrity,” followed by the rejection of liberal modernity, which draws heavily on Traditionalist understandings, and “is rooted in the idea that liberalism is not just a political model but a spiritual disintegration.” Beyond these come “the weaponization of aesthetics and political theology,” an idea that is only discussed briefly.

All these channels not only post Dugin’s own materials but also republish materials from other networks, including the Latin American channels like Novaresistenciabrasil and NostraAmerica. Messaging is also adapted to each language audience, with French readers encountering “Europe’s spiritual decline [and] the betrayal of French Christian identity by laïcité,” Latin Americans learning of US neocolonialism, and the US audience reading of “cultural Marxism” and “the ‘Orthobro’ phenomenon— a loosely defined digital identity that valorizes Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional masculinity, hierarchical social order, and pre-modern aesthetics.” “This eclectic mix… provides Dugin’s ecosystem with a cross-ideological range that strengthens its claim to intellectual authority across both the far-right and dissident left,” in the view of Laruelle and Bozalka.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr and friends

At the age of 94, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has formally retired, and this was marked by a meeting at Geroge Washington University with many speakers, including Nasr himself. The entire meeting was filmed, as is available on YouTube, here. It lasted six hours and forty-three minutes, so it will be some time before I can go through it all, but it provides a rich source for those interested in Nasr, as well as a fitting tribute to a great thinker.

My thanks to Ali Mohammad Eskandari Joo for drawing this to my attention.

Traditionalism and Eastern Orthodoxy: Call for contributions

The reception of Traditionalism has been better studied in some contexts than in others. This Call invites proposals for chapters in a forthcoming multi-author book to be entitled The Reception of Traditionalism in Eastern Orthodoxy: Mysticism and Politics, edited by Mark Sedgwick. Contributors will be invited to an authors’ workshop in Belgrade in March 2027 to discuss pre-circulated drafts (expenses covered by the organizers).

Topics to be covered include: Traditionalism in interwar Romania: Mircea Eliade and his circles; Traditionalism in Yugoslavia and Serbia; Eastern Orthodox Traditionalism in the West: James Cutsinger, Philip Sherrard, and John Tavener; Traditionalism in late-Soviet and early post-Soviet Russia; Traditionalism in Ukraine, Belarus, post-Communist Romania, and b; Aleksander Dugin and the development of Traditionalist Eurasianism; and perhaps also Traditionalism in Bulgaria, Moldova, and/or Georgia.

Chapters should cover the reception of Traditionalism in the country(ies) and period(s) in question, explaining who transmitted and developed Traditionalist thought, what aspects were stressed, glossed over, and further developed, and how this relates to the context of the place(s) and time(s).

Brief proposals (500 words), including a proposed title, should be sent to Mark Sedgwick (mjrs@cas.au.dk) before midnight CET on February 15, accompanied by a biographical note that mentions relevant prior publications. Feel free to send more than one proposal. On the basis of these proposals, actual chapters will be commissioned as soon as possible, to be researched and drafted before March 2027.

The authors’ workshop will refine the drafts and allow us to discuss how the reception and development of Traditionalism in Eastern Orthodoxy differs from what happened in the Catholic and Protestant West, and in Latin America, and to explore what this tells us about Traditionalism, mysticism, politics, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

“Traditionalism” as used in this Call refers to those working with the idea of an esoteric primordial tradition as developed by René Guénon. The book will not cover forms of traditionalism that have no connection with Guénon.

This project is funded by the Templeton Religion Trust through the Program in the Study of Mysticism (PRISM) at Tampere University, Finland.

New Project on Traditionalist Approaches to East Asian Religions

Traditionalists have drawn heavily on Asian religions and their concepts, notably Islamic Sufism and Indian Vedanta, but also on East Asian religions such as Japanese Zen Buddhism and Shinto, and Chinese Daoism. They have adapted these concepts to their own intellectual framework in an Orientalist manner. 

While the South Asian and Middle Eastern connections and influences of Traditionalism have been relatively well researched, the East Asian dimension has received less attention. Figures such as Julius Evola (who produced two “translations” of the Daodejing, among others) and second-generation Traditionalist Seraphim Rose engaged substantially with East Asia. Orientalist tropes of Japanese religion and culture are conspicuous in several Traditionalist projects, living on in popular culture to this day.

The project “Traditionalist East Asia” therefore explores how Traditionalist thinkers have approached East Asia and its traditions, and how these continue to influence various religious and political discourses, sometimes in highly controversial ways, to the present day. Topics covered range from the contemporary appropriation of Zen by the Far Right and perennialist images of Japan in American counterculture to the mid-twentieth-century exchange of concepts of race and empire.

This three-year project has commenced at the University of Vienna and the University of Graz with funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project is led by Lukas K. Pokorny (University of Vienna) and Franz Winter (University of Graz). The postdoctoral researchers are Moritz Maurer (University of Vienna) and Marleen Thaler (University of Graz). The research collaborator is Davide Marino (University of Göttingen).

Bloomington

Just published: an article by Mark Sedgwick (me) on "The Traditionalist micro-utopia of Bloomington, Indiana," in the Journal of Political Ideologies, available here, open access. It starts with general considerations regarding Traditionalism and politics and utopias in general, as the article was written for a special issue focusing on the political. It then looks at Frithjof Schuon's community in Bloomington during the 1980s. Conclusion: "In many ways the Bloomington community was indeed a spiritual micro-utopia free of modern vulgarity and bathed in beauty. To an extent, practice corresponded to principle... In the end, however, the objectives that proved easiest were the less central ones, the aesthetic and the aristocratic. Spiritual objectives were marred by distractions, passions, and ambitions."

More on Traditionalism in Hungary

There is a good discussion of Traditionalism in Hungary in a new book on Modern Hungarian Political Thought: Ideologies and Traditions by Zoltán Balázs and Csaba Molnár (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). It comes in a chapter on “National Radicalism, Radical Conservatism, National Socialism and Traditionalism,” available here. Traditionalism is discussed along with these other trends because they are all to the right of moderate or classical conservatism. 

Traditionalism is introduced first in general terms, and then in the Hungarian context. “Much as elsewhere in Europe,” write Balázs and Molnár, “traditionalism in Hungary was never a serious political movement. However, it can boast some fascinating intellectuals.” They then discuss these: the Dialogical School of Béla Tábor (1907–1992) and Lajos Szabó (1902–1967), who attacked modernity in their Vádirat a szellem ellen (Indictment Against the Spirit, 1936), and whose group Béla Hamvas (1897–1968), discussed in earlier posts here and here, joined. 

Then we have András László (born 1984) and Tibor Imre Baranyi (born 1967), also discussed in posts already linked, and their influence on recent politics. Balázs and Molnár conclude: “In its early phase, some important politicians of… Jobbik, including its previous chairman, Gábor Vona, were heavily influenced by these traditionalist tenets. However… it has been radical conservatism… that has been the most successful in absorbing certain traditionalist arguments, mostly the modernity-criticizing ones.” It would be interesting to see this second argument more fully developed.

Between Hamvas in the first generation and László and Baranyi today, Balázs and Molnár insert Thomas Molnar (1921-2010), an American philosopher of Hungarian origin who became popular in Hungary after 1989 and who they also class as a Traditionalist. Molnar is certainly close to Guénon’s Traditionalism as an anti-modernist who regrets desacralization, values esotericism, and condemns occultism as a modern confusion, and he cites Guénon as well as Mircea Eliade and Titus Burckhardt, but his focus is mostly that of the mainstream American Right, certainty in his earlier years, before he moved in the direction of Alain de Benoist. He seems not close enough to Guénon to be classed as a Traditionalist, but I may be wrong.

A new journal and a new generation

A new Traditionalist journal was published in 2023: Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions (cover to left). It represents a new generation of Traditionalists: Americans, Russians, and Europeans.

Passages describes itself as “a textual forum for studies on and in Traditionalism” in succession to earlier Traditionalist journals such as Études traditionelles, Studies in Comparative Religion, Sophia, and Sacred Web, and is published by PRAV Publishing, on whom more below. It is more of an annual than a journal, as the first volume is 393 pages long, and the next volume is due in 2024 or perhaps early 2025.

The lead editor of Passages and the Editor-in-chief of PRAV Publishing is Jafe Arnold, an American with an MA in Religious Studies and Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Philosophy and Education at the University of Warsaw, where he submitted a dissertation on “Heidegger’s Ins and Outs of Plato’s Cave: The Mythical Liberation of Education in Heidegger’s On The Essence of Truth” in 2024. Arnold is one of the most active Traditionalists of the new generation, and has worked on and with Alexander Dugin. One article of his was previously discussed on this blog (see here). 

The opening article in Passages 1 is a translation of Dugin’s “René Guénon: Traditionalism as Language,” originally a 1998 lecture, and certainly one of Dugin’s most important pieces on this topic. Of the following seventeen articles, two are by Russians, three by Hungarians, and six by Italians, including two authors from the Julius Evola Foundation (definitely not the new generation). There are also two Americans, one Belarusian, one Englishman, and one Frenchman—this last being Jean-Pierre Laurant, the venerable doyen of French scholars of Guénon, neither new generation nor usually associated with Dugin.

PRAV Publishing (website at pravpublishing.com) describes itself as “devoted to the publication of scholarly and popular works which build bridges of ideas between Continents and Civilizations.” The ideas in question are those of Traditionalists, especially Russian ones. So far it has published sixteen books. These include three volumes on the Foundations of Eurasianism, translated and edited by Arnold together with John Stachelski, an American who recently completed a PhD on “The geopoetics of an undiscovered continent: Eurasianism as a writing practice” at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. The first volume of the Foundations is introduced by the contemporary Russian Traditionalist and Eurasianist Leonid Savin, and contains texts by the classic first-generation Eurasianists, especially Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), Petr Savitsky (1895-1968), and Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). These are the thinkers on whom Dugin’s Eurasianism, sometimes called neo-Eurasianism, builds, combined with Guénon and Evola.

Two of the other books are by Daria Dugina (1992-2022), the daughter of Alexander Dugin who was killed by a Ukrainian car bomb that was probably intended for her father. There are no books by Dugin himself, as the English translations of these are mostly published by Arktos, an older publisher focusing on Traditionalist works, established in 2009. Five of PRAV’s other books are by Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov), a Russian Pagan Traditionalist who was once a prominent member of Dugin's Eurasian Youth Union and in 2011 founded Svarte Aske (Norwegian: Dark Ash[tree]), an Odinist community in Siberia. Then there are two books by Boris Nad, a Serbian writer whose Vreme imperija (Time of Empires, 2002) was published with an introduction by Dragoš Kalajić, the leading Serbian Traditionalist of the first generation, discussed in a recent blog post here. In addition there four more books written by two Americans, a Russian, and an Italian. 

I am told that PRAV is working on an English translation of Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola (The Adventurous life of Julius Evola), a monumental biography of Evola, a blog post on which is overdue. 

PRAV, Passages, and Arnold and his collaborators are definitely worth watching. 

This post has been edited to correct a number of small errors.

Alexander Dugin interviewed by Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson, the American political talk-show host who in February 2024 interviewed President Putin for his own show on X, the Tucker Carlson Encounter, has now interviewed Alexander Dugin. 

In the 20-minute interview, available here, Dugin develops two arguments. The first is that the central problem today is individualism, which starts with the Protestant reformation, passes through a transition from a classic liberalism that is about the rule of the majority to a new liberalism that is about the rule of minorities and is in fact prescriptive and totalitarian. This new liberalism seeks liberation from all collective identities—most recently gender, which has now become a matter of choice, and finally from humanity itself, moving towards the post-humanism of The Matrix. The second argument is that the reason that Western progressives hate Putin is that he is a defender of “traditional values,” a phrase that Dugin uses several times. He understands these values as being the traditional sovereign state, the traditional family, and traditional belief. This, he says, is metaphysical. But he has not become purely statist; he also mentions Russian civilization as a “world region,” without going in to what he means by this. He is referring to his early understanding of sacred geography, in which the Russian world region becomes the traditional East in contrast to the modern West. This was, of course, one of René Guénon’s fundamental ideas, though Guénon’s East was a different East. For Guénon, individualism was an important aspect of modernity, and the classic pair of modern and traditional can be seen behind the interview’s pair of individualist progressivism and tradition. 

Dugin’s views in the interview are not a great surprise. If anything, the surprise is that Tucker Carlson likes them so much, which he evidently does. The Daily Beast has described the interview as “deranged” (here), and one comment on Twitter suggested that Carlson had been brainwashed. So far the interview has clocked 5.3 million views.

Dugin, the State Department, and Brazil

Nova Resistênca (New Resistance), a Brazilian group that draws on and supports Alexander Dugin and is led by Raphael Machado, originally a proponent of Julius Evola before he discovered Dugin, has drawn the attention of the US State Department. 

Nova Resistênca is the subject of a report, available here, by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a group that aims to “understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” The report concludes that “While there is no direct evidence that… Nova Resistência [and certain other organizations that have promoted Dugin’s work]… are controlled by Russian intelligence services, the organizations have the hallmarks of other proxy websites and organizations that the FSB, GRU or SVR are known to direct, task or influence.”

The report is less interested in Nova Resistênca and Dugin’s thought than in how this thought is delivered and in possible links to the Russian state. Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory is described only very briefly, and classified as “pro-authoritarian disinformation,” a “neo-fascist, destabilizing ideology,” and part of “a violent, anti-liberal, neo-fascist agenda that serves as an ideological vehicle to destabilize democracies, upend the rules-based international order, and agitate for revanchist military activity in favor of the Kremlin’s strategic goals.”

The evidence for Nova Resistênca being a Russian proxy is far from conclusive, but still interesting. Its website, http://novaresistencia.org/, is hosted in Moscow, and shares an IP address with Dugin’s https://www.4pt.su/en. This website re-publishes a variety of pro-Russian material, including stories that promoted the Wagner Group, as well as Dugin’s material. Nova Resistênca and an address to it by Dugin were reported favorably by the Russian news service, Sputnik. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, spoke at an online “Global Conference on Multipolarity” organized by Nova Resistênca, Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, a Chinese state organization, and the International Movement of Russophiles, a recently-established organization that evidently enjoys Russian state support and shares some activists with the Eurasian Movement. Whether Lavrov was invited by Nova Resistênca, Dugin, the Chinese, or the International Movement of Russophiles is unclear, but my guess would be the latter.

In the end, the report really only demonstrates that Nova Resistênca is inspired by Dugin, and that Dugin is anti-American, which we already knew. Perhaps what is most interesting is precisely that the US State Department has become interested in Nova Resistênca and Dugin. 

The report also identifies a number of other pro-Dugin groups that I have no investigated: the Center for Syncretic Studies in Serbia (2013-2022), the Junta Nacionalista del Peru and the Centro de Estudios Crisolistas (also Peru), the Vanguardia Nacional (Colombia), the Plataforma Multipolar (Argentina), the Coordinadora Nacional Tempestista (Mexico), and the Círculo Patriótico Chile.Probably all worth looking at.

My thanks to WP for drawing my attention to the report.

A new and independent branch of the Maryamiyya

A new and independent branch of the Maryamiyya, the "Washington-Baltimore Branch of the Maryamiyyah Tariqah," has been established, and has established an online presence. Some of the content on its main website, theperennialfoundation.org, is restricted to members, but some of it is generally available, including comments by its shaykh, Terry Moore (Shaykh al-Bashir, pictured left) about how the branch became established, which are also available on YouTube.

Moore joined the Maryamiyya in Lausanne in 1975, and separated from the main tariqa in 2017, along with Hasan Awan, who is now his khalifa (deputy), and the late James Cutsinger (1953-2020), who was a leading follower of Frithjof Schuon in a personal capacity, though never (as an Orthodox Christian) a formal member of the tariqa. 

The Washington-Baltimore Maryamiyya describes itself on its other website, maryamiyyah.org, as “orthodox and universalist.” The orthodoxy is circumscribed: they "observe the Sunna as much as feasible in our circumstances, and follow the essential elements and spirit of the Shari’ah" [my emphasis]. The universalism is described in terms of “transcendent unity,” Frithjof Schuon’s major contribution to Traditionalist doctrine, and thus “We accept the uncorrupted forms of all the orthodox religions as true and do not regard any of them, in their essence, as superior.” [my emphasis] This, again, is a limitation on their claimed Islamic orthodoxy. Moore makes clear in his book Here, Now, One: A Practical Guide to the Spiritual Life (Salisbury, England: New Sarum Press, 2021) that his starting point is perennialism: “Unfortunately… we can’t practice perennialism, as it has no form. It is a smile without a cat… In order to be operative, it must be packaged in a form that allows practice. The package it comes in is orthodox religion.”

The Washington-Baltimore Maryamiyya acknowledges the teachings of René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Its website says that it was “the Shaykh of the Washington, DC branch of our order,” i.e. Nasr, who “authorized our two leaders to establish an independent branch of the order.” So perhaps not an acrimonious split. But evidently not all are happy, as one comment on Facebook warns that the group “has departed to a vast extent from and is critical of much of the traditionalist-perennialist perspective and the spiritual heritage and… method broadly affirmed and transmitted by all other branches of the Tariqah Maryamiyyah” and is “varyingly modernist, postmodernist, and New Age/self-help.” This post alleges that Moore and Awan are excessively influenced by the Direct Path of the Indian guru Sri Atmananda (1883-1959).

The presentation of the tariqa stresses respect for all “regardless of gender, race, class, or previous religious affiliation,” and states that "faqirat" (female members) “participate in leadership and decision making within our community at all levels.” It adds: “We require our leaders to adhere to the highest moral standards, especially in their relationship with fuqara’ [male followers] and faqirat [female followers].” This seems to be an acknowledgement of some of the problems from which the main Maryamiyya suffered in earlier periods, and a determination not to repeat then.

It is unclear how large the branch is, but Moore’s YouTube channel, herenowone, has 117 subscribers.

Two other connected websites are www.herenowone.org and radiusfoundation.org.

Many thanks to the reader of this blog who draw my attention to all this. 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting Traditionalist conference

An interesting Traditionalist conference is currently underway at the University of Notre Dame, entitled “Converging Wisdom? Questioning the Continued Relevance of the Perennial Philosophy” (October 2, 2022 – October 4, 2022). The keynote is by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on “What is Perennial Philosophy and Why is it Significant Today?” The most prominent speaker, then, does see the Perennial Philosophy as still relevant, as do many other speakers. 

The schedule is available here, and the speakers include both prominent members of the Maryamiyya and other notable Traditionalists, and perhaps even a few scholars who are not Traditionalists, though I am not sure of that. It was possible to register to follow the conferecne online, and registration still seems to be open.

Thanks to C for bringing this conference to my attention.

In memoriam Peter Lamborn Wilson

Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945-2022), also known as Hakim Bey, died on May 23, 2022 at his home in Saugerties, NY, at the age of 76. His transition from the Maryamiyya to becoming one of the most important contemporary theorists of anarchism is discussed in an earlier blog post and subsequent comments, here. May God have mercy on him and on is all.

Wendell Berry, Soft Traditionalist

Photo from the New Yorker

Wendell Berry (born 1934), the American writer and agrarian, has spent much of his life siding with the land against the industrial exploiters of the land, and of farmers, and of the American rural way of life. He has written essays and books, notably The Unsettling of America (1977), as well as poetry and novels, notably Nathan Coulter (1960). For some, he follows in the steps of Henry David Thoreau. In another way, he also follows in the steps of the English Traditionalist and environmentalist Lord Northbourne (1896-1982), who combined Traditionalist perspectives with the biodynamic theories of the founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). 

In 2008, the Maryami-affiliated publisher World Wisdom Books published a collection of Lord Northbourne’s writings, and Berry wrote a foreword to it. In this he noted that Northbourne had aligned himself with René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Marco Pallis, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, and added “I have read the four last-named at length and have been strongly affected and influenced by them.” 

That Berry did not describe himself as affected and influenced by Guénon and Schuon makes sense: he generally keeps away from religion in his writings, as “religion is a far more difficult subject than agriculture,” as he wrote. Yet “those who take agriculture seriously enough and study it long enough will come to issues that will have to be recognized as religious.” 

What, then, was the influence of the Traditionalists on Berry? It is hard to say, as he does not often name them in his writings. He is certainly a “soft” Traditionalist, drawing on the body of Traditionalist thought without dedicating himself to it. He values quality and form over quantity, and is as critical of modernity as any Traditionalist, following Coomaraswamy (and before him Ruskin) in associating it with industrial civilization. In opposition to modern industrial civilization he places not tradition but the rural, but with reservations. 

In one essay he quotes at length a late-eighteenth-century Methodist minister describing the behavior of a group of men from Kentucky (where Berry was born and lives) who passed the time after dinner by fighting each other. “The significance of this bit of history is in its utter violence,” notes Berry. And not just the violence of the men fighting each other, but of the way they also fought the “Indians,” and also the way that they treated the land they were occupying—far more brutally than the Indians, or “the peasants of certain old agricultural societies, particularly in the Orient.” The difference was that the Indian and the peasant “belonged deeply and intricately to their places,” while Americans of European origin, did not belong in any place, and on the whole still do not. And from this results the environmental crisis, the loss of topsoil that Berry often laments, and the loss of the life properly lived.

My thanks to Travis Kitchens for drawing my attention to Berry.

More on Hakim Bey

In a recent post, I described Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) as a “former Maryami,” and wondered how he had moved from the Maryamiyya to the Temporary Autonomous Zone. I have since had two suggested explanations.

One, provided by someone who knew Wilson in Tehran, is that although Wilson was definitely “in the circle of Nasr,” he was not actually a Maryami. He considered himself a Muslim, and admired Frithjof Schuon—he thought his Transcendent Unity of Religions was the most important book of the twentieth century—but he did not follow any one ṭarīqa exclusively. As well as being in the circle of Nasr, he spent a lot of time with the Ni'matullāhīs (Javad Nurbakhsh had a large following at that time, including foreigners) and was always interested in other, less mainstream forms of Islam.

Christian Greer has meanwhile drawn my attention to the discussion between Arthur Versluis and Wilson (see earlier post) where Versluis asks Wilson about his relationship with Traditionalism, and Wilson responds that he never stopped being a Traditionalist, and just rejected “the party line,” “the rigid exclusivist neo-Traditionalism of the sort that leads to murky politics and interpersonal, interhuman relations.” “Murky politics” might refer to Nasr’s political relations with the Shah’s regime, and “murky… interhuman relations” might refer to difficulties in Bloomington. As the earlier post discusses, Wilson goes on to propose an alternative “even more traditional Traditionalism.”

Further reading: Zaheer Kazmi, “Automatic Islam: Divine Anarchy and the Machines of God,” Modern Intellectual History 12, 1 (2015): 33–64, which looks at Hakim Bey and two other “Muslim anarchists,” and Wilson’s own Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (New York: Autonomedia, 1987) and his Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993).

American Jews and Sufism

Quite a lot of Traditionalists have been Jewish, perhaps disproportionately, just as quitea lof of American Sufis have been Jewish, and quite a lot of American Buddhists, too. A new book, Emily Sigalow's American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton University Press, 2019), asks why. her book and its implications for Sufism are discussed in a post on the sister of this blog, at "American Jews, Buddhism, and Sufism."

A new framing of Hakim Bey

A new PhD thesis places the anarchism of the former Maryami Peter Lamborn Wilson (also known as Hakim Bey) in a new context. This is J. Christian Greer, “Angel-Headed Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen-Eighties North America” (University of Amsterdam, 2020), especially pp. 231-65.

Hakim Bey has already been discussed in two posts on this blog, the longest of which, “Anarchist Traditionalism,” draws largely on Arthur Versluis, “A Conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson.” The other, “The Origins of Hakim Bey's Anarchism,” draws on a 2013 article by Greer.

Greer’s dissertation starts with the earliest US psychedelic militancy—Timothy Leary in the 1960s—and follows through to the “second wave” psychedelic militancy of the Church of SubGenius, one of the sources (along with the spread of the Xerox machine) of the later “Zine scene” to which Wilson contributed. As Greer argues, Wilson ties the two waves together, since his 1964 Moorish Orthodox Church of America (which was psychedelic) allied with Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery in 1967. From this perspective, Wilson’s engagement with Traditionalism and the Maryamiyya appears as a sort of detour: the path from the Moorish Orthodox Church of America to the Temporary Autonomous Zone for which Wilson became famous runs relatively straight; it is Tehran and the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy that make less sense. All three phases, however, can certainly be seen as part of a grand “quest to find a spiritual alternative to the alienation of modern civilization” (p. 2), as Greer says.

And yet, the mystery remains. The Maryamiyya replaces the Moorish Orthodox Church of America for Wilson, as Sufi Islam replaced the Universal Gnostic Church for René Guénon, in a transition from "pseudo-initiation" to "initiation"—putting it in Traditionalist terms. The Wilson of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America grew interested in what he called “Sufism of various unorthodox varieties”—which is one view of Sufism, once fairly prevalent, though one images that Seyyed Hossein Nasr would have disabused Wilson of it fairly quickly one Wilson reached Tehran. This makes sense. But how did the Temporary Autonomous Zone then replace initiation? Somewhere, something got lost.

The thesis is also interesting for a new take on the vexed topic of Wilson’s commitment to “man-boy love,” which Greer argues should be seen as a reaction to the normalization of gay sexuality by the mainstream Gay Rights movement, which in the process abandoned the earlier aim of total sexual liberation. Greer also points out that the two crucial special issues of Semiotext(e) that Wilson edited, on Loving Boys and Polysexuality, attracted contributions from Michel Foucault, William Burroughs, and Jacques Lacan—that is, some sort of liberation mainstream.

Bannon, Traditionalism, Dugin, and Olavo

Benjamin Teitelbaum has just published a major new book on contemporary Traditionalism, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: Harper Collins, cover to left) or, in the UK, War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (London: Allen Lane, 2020, cover below).

Teitelbaum is an American scholar who has previously published Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017), an excellent ethnographic study of radical nationalists and the related music scene in Sweden, and although War for Eternity is written in light, journalistic style, it is based on thorough research, principally long interviews with its main subject, Steve Bannon.

The book’s US cover and title focus on Bannon, but the UK cover and title are closer to the contents, as the book also covers several other Traditionalists, notably Alexander Dugin (Russia) and Olavo de Carvalho (Brazil), and then Gábor Vona of Jobbik (Hungary) and John Morgan of Integral Tradition Publishing and Arktos (online).

Some of what is in War for Eternity will come as no surprise to those who know their Traditionalism and/or have read my Against the Modern World, but much of it is new and interesting. Most of all, Teitelbaum’s long discussions with Bannon reveal Bannon’s own, modified, version of Traditionalism, and resolve a number of mysteries.

• Firstly, what Bannon now takes from Traditionalism is, in his own words, “the rejection of modernity, the rejection of the Enlightenment, the rejection of materialism,” and the understanding that “culture, true culture, is based upon immanence and transcendence.”

• Secondly, Bannon reconciled Traditionalism with populism by identifying the American working class with tradition, and America’s globalized elites with modernity. In Guénon’s terms, in the hierarchy of values “proceeding from the body, to money, to earthly creeds, to Spirituality,” it is the elites who are slaves to money, and the working class that may perhaps access spirituality. In Evola’s terms, it is the working class who are the warriors: “The aristos don’t fight! They strictly don’t fight.” All in all, it is the working class that is “out of time, insulated from the corrupting influences of modernity; vessels for eternal ideals and carriers of a spirit that unites a society internally and separates it from others elsewhere.”

• Thirdly, Bannon agrees with the Traditionalists that the end of the temporal cycle means that destruction inevitably proceeds a new cycle. Trump is the great destroyer, though Bannon more often calls him “the disrupter.” The early moves of the Trump administration, in which Bannon’s ideas were still influential, were aimed at the destruction of the forces of modernity in the form of the “administrative state,” in this instance the federal government. Unfortunately from Bannon’s perspective (though he does not put it quite like this), Trump then also went on to destroy his own administration, and thus also the possibility of it actually achieving anything very much. That was not the original idea (though perhaps it was fortunate, at least for those who see the federal government as performing necessary functions).

• Fourthly, Trump’s enmity towards China fits with Bannon’s Traditionalist views. For Bannon, “The globalists are totally tied to the mercantilist totalitarian system of the Chinese. China is the economic engine that drives it all. Without China, it doesn’t work; that’s what’s driven the system.” Bannon tried to convince Dugin of this during a long meeting between the two in Rome, arguing that the Chinese are trying to create precisely the unipolar world that Dugin has spent much of his career arguing against. Bannon very much liked Dugin’s Forth Political Theory. It seems that Dugin was less convinced by Bannon.

Also of interest is what Teitelbaum learned of Traditionalism in Hungary, where it combined nicely with Turanism, the 19th-century nationalist view that joined Hungarians with Turks, Central Asians, Japanese, and Koreans. Just as Eurasianism proved a good basis for Dugin to construct a vision of Russia as part of a traditional alternative to Western modernity, so Turanism helped Vona construct a vision of Hunagary as part of another traditional alternative to Western modernity. Vona opened the King Attila Academy to explore and promote such views, and then closed it in 2015 when it became a political liability.

Somewhat less interesting is the section towards the end of the book on the relationship between Jason Jorjani, an American activist of Iranian origin who is influenced by Traditionalist, and Michael Bagley, a con-artist who ended up in jail.

One criticism: the book perhaps relies too much on interviews, and more attention could usefully have been paid to what Dugin and Carvalho have written.

All in all, however, required reading.