Michael Millerman - Inside Putins Brain: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin

Given the tectonic shifts in global geo-politics and the intense intellectual ferment on the right in recent times, it could not be more timely for those with a serious interest in political philosophy to become exposed to and absorbed in the work of the Russian thinker Alexander Dugin. [] This book of essays will be indispensable reading for all serious students of the swiftly flowing currents of twenty-first century political philosophy.

COLIN D. PEARCE, CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

"You may disagree with something Millerman writes about Dugin, but you cannot ignore him. He is the leading English-language interpreter of Dugin's thought in general and its Heideggerian orientations in particular."

BENJAMIN R. TEITELBAUM, AUTHOR OF WAR FOR ETERNITY: THE RISE OF THE POPULIST RIGHT AND THE RETURN OF TRADITIONALISM

Millerman has insight into Putin at a philosophical level.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO, SENIOR FELLOW, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE

To master Heidegger is the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society in the near term.

ALEXANDER DUGIN

Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

LEO STRAUSS

On March 31st, 2014, Foreign Affairs published an article by Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn called Putins Brain: Alexander Dugin and the Philosophy Behind Putins Invasion of Crimea.

Broad interest in Dugin spiked again in 2022 after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the start of what he called a Special Military Operation to de-Nazify Ukraine and protect the people and territories of the Donbass a war that was condemned across the Western world and that gave rise to a slew of new articles about Dugins political ideas. Similarities between Putins rhetoric and Dugins key concepts on matters including peoplehood, multipolarity, and anti-liberalism strongly suggested that Dugin could again provide a key for interpreting Putins actions. Dugin and Putin often seem to be reading the same writings, written in golden letters on the skies of Russian history, as Dugin has said.

The explosion of interest in Dugin at times of heightened conflict between Russia and Ukraine has produced works of varying quality, ranging from competent and well-informed analyses by theoretically inclined scholars to the hysterical ravings of overzealous liberal lunatics. This book aims to contribute to the former category. It is a collection of essays that I wrote about Dugin over ten years of studying him and translating his books. I was the co-translator of his first book to be published in English, The Fourth Political Theory. I also translated The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory, Last War of the World Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia (pseudonymously), Ethnos and Society, Ethnosociology: The Foundations, Political Platonism, and Theory of a Multipolar World, as well as a few other essays, speeches, and book chapters. I wrote about Dugin in my first book Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political, and I did not stop studying him even when pressured to do so.

What I hope makes this collection distinct compared to the other things written about Dugin is not only that it relies more on primary sources than on pundits recycled takes but that it was written with an eye to his work as a political philosopher. It is worth pausing for a few moments to consider what that means and why it should matter to you.

Articles about Dugin tend to focus on one of the following topics:

• His importance as a geopolitical thinker, highlighting his infamous Foundations of Geopolitics, for instance;
• His relationship to traditionalism, a school that includes Rene Guenon and Julius Evola;
• His influence on the global far right (Dugin and neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, the alt-right, deplorables);
• His Rasputin-like role in contemporary Russia;
• His marginality or centrality.

It is far less common for Dugin to be treated as a political philosopher, where the relevant points of reference are people like Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. And yet, Dugin thinks of himself primarily as a philosopher and his conception of philosophy links it inextricably with the concept of the political.

My favourite example for everyday purposes of the fact that Dugin sees himself as a philosopher comes from his 2019 interview with Amos Barshad. Barshad asks Dugin about the comparison often made between him and Rasputin (besides Putins Brain, Dugin is often referred to as Putins Rasputin, which is the title of the article in which the interview appears).

Hes not offended. Not in the slightest. Soberly, he analyzes the pairing. So. The figure of Rasputin is misunderstood. He had influence over our tsar, personal influence. He was against the modernization and Westernization. He was in favor of Russian people instead of the corrupted Russian elite. So far, more than a few points of overlap between Aleksandr and Grigori. Certainly, Dugin is Rasputinesque.

At first glance, the comparison with Rasputin matches Dugins criticisms of the modern West and his elaborate defences of the Russian people as compared to Westernized Russian elites.

But! Rasputin wasnt a philosopher. He didnt conceptualize anything. Hes a kind of hypnotizer, a kind of a trickster, something like that. So the comparison is a little bit limited. He built his influence on the personal charm and on his individual influence on the tsar. That was a very special case. This was person-to-person, without some ideology. Some philosophy.

As you can see, Dugin clearly states the specific difference between himself and Rasputin: Rasputin wasnt a philosopher. In the interview, he instead compares himself to the mythical Merlin, a figure he interprets as the image of the intellectual that is engaged in supra-human contemplation and who is at the same time the founder of an empire (King Arthurs).

Now, it is all too easy for unimaginative, hollowed out professors of philosophy and political science to scoff at such an image. But the fact is that the philosopher-founder is a well attested topic in political philosophy, from Platos Philosopher King to Nietzsches Zarathustra, who flew higher in his contemplation than anyone before him in order to bring to mankind a teaching unlike anything it had ever known.

One of the merits of Dugins self-conception is that it forces us to become the people for whom the intense combination of philosophical contemplation and political founding can come to sight clearly not an easy task, but one that is indispensable if we are to make any progress in understanding Putins brain. It is difficult. But we must try.

The goal of this book is to help you grasp the ideological dimensions of contemporary Russia by studying Russias chief ideological mastermind, yes, but also, through Dugin, to indicate some issues relating to the problem of political philosophy more generally.