On Medium: Aleksandr Dugin’s Critique of Liberalism
This article assesses and explores this influential Russian philosopher's postmodern, traditionalist criticism of liberalism. Is his critique just cynical and incoherent or should we be searching for an alternative to liberalism?
Thank you for that enlightening article. Putin holds a certain repulsive fascination for me, but hardly anyone writes about his political philosophy (or his pretensions of having a political philosophy).
ReplyDeleteDugin comes off more as an apologist than a political philosopher. Granted, most philosophers were apologetic to some degree regarding their own cultures (such as Aristotle's weak justification for slavery), but overall they questioned more than they justified.
I disagree with the accusation that liberalism becomes illiberal when it presumes to judge other cultures or even impose itself upon them. Enforcing a liberal social order on an unwilling population would certainly be undemocratic, but not necessarily illiberal. The confusion seems to arise from confounding liberalism with democracy as if one naturally followed from the other; but there really is no historical basis for this fallacy. Paraclesian Athens was a democracy, but it was hardly liberal. After all, what kind of liberal society relies on slavery, treats its female citizens like chattle, & forces anyone who questions it to kindly drink hemlock & die? On the other end there have been extremely authoritarian, but nonetheless liberal, regimes like Sicily was under Robert II, Napoleon's France, & Iran under the Shah.
Personally, I consider myself a diehard liberal which is why I oppose democracy. Democracy, left unchecked, is inevitably illiberal because it seeks to impose the will of the majority on the individual. Liberalism isn't about the rule of the majority or, for that matter, an aristocratic minority. Liberalism is a system that seeks to maximize human potential & freedom; however that goal is achieved is really tangential to the liberal enterprise.
Liberalism certainly isn't identical with democracy. I'd say liberalism is closer to individualism. Liberalism was progressive in so far as it departed from the static, caste-based feudal system, the idea being that individuals generally should be liberated to make it or to fail on their own merits. In short, Everyman was equated with the sovereign monarch. It was a power grab by the hoi palloi or at least by the merchant class. Eventually, the right to liberty was extended to women and minorities.
DeleteSo liberalism seems more closely tied to capitalism than to democracy, but you can see how democracy follows from individualism, since democracy, too, empowers most individuals at the expense of a ruling class. Everyone has the equal right to vote as individuals, regardless of their wealth or gender or breeding. In practice, of course, the leading modern democracy is rigged against most individuals (the Electoral College is undemocratic and keeps the American southerners in the game despite the backwardness and unpopularity of their subculture, so they don’t start another civil war).
Dugin may be an apologist, but his critique of liberalism is consistent in some ways with that of Yuval Harari’s in Homo Deus. And it’s interesting to see what happens when philosophers are empowered rather than marginalized. Bush Jr empowered the neoconservative academics, leading to the Iraq War fiasco. Trump briefly empowered Steve Bannon but then became a Russian asset or stooge. Putin empowered Dugin, and Russia is punching above its weight, making American democracy look like a joke.
Philosophy became this with stupid white men, i mean, the vast majority. Complex texts, beautiful words to talk about ugly thoughts, sophistical daydreams... Take off all that makeup and the content is stunted. Is he considered a philosopher because he has a diploma or is popular ?? The trivialization of philosophy has been the specialty of the "white man".
ReplyDeleteDugin specializes in continental rather than analytic (scientific and logic-centered) philosophy. The former is much more literary than the latter, so it's easier to fake it in the continental tradition, by writing gobbledygook. Then again, you can fake it in virtually any discipline, including analytic philosophy and even the sciences: look at the replication crisis in the medical and social sciences.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I think this is very bad for philosophy. Really much. Its falsification has resulted in demons like Nazism and neo-liberalism.
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