Author: Alexander Dugin
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd, 2018
Available in: Paperback, Hardback, ebook
What is Ethnosociology? In most classes and international relations, and fields that heavily utilise the insights generated by sociology, typically use sociologies derived from the likes of Marx, Weber, Giddens and so on. These sociologies are often centred around contemporary industrial and post-industrial, typically Western, societies. Ethnosociology takes a different approach that includes the insights of anthropology, enabling theorists and researchers to utilise sociological models that don’t take contemporary industrial and post-industrial Western societies as the given baseline for analysis. However, this approach is little known in English-speaking academia. In Ethnos and Society (Dugin, 2018), notorious Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin presents his own ethnosociological model that is robust,incredibly fascinating in spite of losing steam and originality towards the end.
The first thing you will notice when starting this monograph is that it throws a lot of unfamiliar terminology at you to start, such as ethnostatics, ethnodynamics and ethnokinetics and ethnocentrum. At the beginning, orienting yourself is quite dizzying if you are unfamiliar with the ethnosociological approach, but thankfully, these concepts and their essential phenomenological foundational concepts are well explained. As the book goes on, and once it has made you comfortable in understanding the essential concepts, it flows naturally, and theoretical concepts link together in a coherent system. Nevertheless, an introduction that goes into more detail about the history of ethnosociological approaches and general critiques of more common sociological approaches would have been much appreciated in easing readers in. It is only in the final sections of the text where we get Dugin’s explanation of what makes ethnosociology novel and important.
For Dugin, there are four principal forms of society. The first is the ethnos, which is a kind of primordial, fundamental and ‘pre-historic’ form of society which is often characterised by minimal social and ontological differentiation, an immanence of everything and an inclusive structure of thought. It can be agrarian, nomadic or hunter-gatherer. This structure of thought combined with the basic normative beliefs of an ethnos constitutes ethnostatics. Meanwhile, ethnodynamics refers to the rituals, games and practices that an ethnos does to reject the ‘new’ that might be over the horizon and to reaffirm the ethnos as the ethnos, effectively preserving it as is. Essentially, ethnodynamics is the impulse of tradition or more precisely as it can be applied to all social forms, is the conscious and repetitive work that goes into preserving the status quo.
Finally for the ethnos is ethnokinetics, which is the process of social change that precipitates the transformation into the second social form, the narod. This precipitation is characterised by such changes as the taking of slaves, the formation of male military union, the accumulation of surplus and the conquest of one ethnos over multiple, the dominant typically being of the nomadic type that becomes settled after the conquest. Finally, the ethnocentrum splits and this traumatic experience gives rise to the perception of the Other and the passionary impulse, which in the narod is present in distinctions such as immanence versus transcendence.
In this second form, the narod,this is where according to Dugin most of human culture comes from, borne of the traumatic split of the ethnocentrism and a polyethnic unit. This gives rise to the passionary, heroic impulse that is characterised in the triad of state-religion-civilisation, which each narod possesses to different degrees. Examples are sketched out by Dugin in this section, such as the Babylonians, Romans, Islamic or Greeks, which to different degrees possessed these things, where the ideal individuals of hero, prophet and philosopher correspond to each piece of the triad. Linear conceptions of time also become the norm, which is made particularly clear in Greco-Roman mythology, with the imprisonment of primordial entities, such as Chronos, in Tartarus. Also characteristic of the narod is increased social stratification,exemplified in tripartite class hierarchies, or ‘estates’. This stratification is not just economic but also in terms of relation to the world as the heroic, passionary impulse in concentrated primarily in the elite, aristocratic classes whereas the ‘masses’, especially in rural and peripheral regions, tend to be more like the ethnos, but not quite the same.
When I paused to think about this model and apply it to say, the Nordic dark age and subsequent Viking age, a case which is not mentioned at all by Dugin, I found that Dugin’s model is fairly generalisable. Although not able to account for every nuance, it could account for many that I could think of, making the two fundamental social types in Dugin’s model as a good analytic and narrative framework for the histories of ancient and medieval societies and for national general histories.
The third type, the nation, which is noted as principally a European phenomenon, takes another fundamental turn, characterised by such developments as language standardisation, the formation of political ideologies, such as liberalism, and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie in political life and their class dominance during industrialisation. Here, Dugin leans more heavily into the Marxist sociological tradition and other more familiar sociological territory. For Dugin, the nation, while claiming to be the successor to the narod, is merely a simulacrum as the passionary impulse starts to wane and transmute into economic competition. States become organised primarily on rational, economic grounds that also erode polyglossia and diverse regional cultures as a ‘national culture’ forms, in which urban centres project and impose its values throughout the provinces. The experiences of early Industrial Age England and Revolutionary France is what Dugin is alluding to here. Furthermore, the nature of classes changes as ownership over the means of production become a more prominent issue and society is dichotomised into proletariat and bourgeoisie.
According to Dugin, in the proletariat is the remnant of the peasant, which is exemplified by the culture of proletarianized peasants in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia (Figes, 2017). Various models of nationalism are described by Dugin that have varying radicalism and socialist modernity is briefly mentioned as a special case, although with little detail. Socialist modernity in my view, at least based on the Soviet model imposed in Eastern Europe, follows the same basic structure as the nationalist project, just predicated on a different political theory and ‘rational’ economic model. The principal models of nationalism here are conservative or radical nationalism (‘big Nationalism’), autonomy and separatism (‘small nationalism’), irredentism and colonialism, all which Dugin explains clearly and provides easy to understand examples.
The final social form for Dugin is the civil/global society, which Dugin leans further into deference of conventional sociology, offering little original apart from stating that the characteristics of civil society are contained in the nation, but are constrained. Civil society here is best considered in the context of Soviet collapse to the present day, inclusive of all the technological developments, such as internet, especially in liberal societies. Much of the section on civil and global society are reframed versions of critiques of liberalism and communism that were more powerfully presented in The Fourth Political Theory (Dugin, 2012).
At one point in Ethnos and Society, Dugin claims that these sociological models aren’t meant to be seen as necessarily better or worse than one another, but to anyone who is familiar with Dugin’s other work, it is clear that the traditional societies embodied in the narod and its elite will to power is his ideal model, whereas the contemporary civil society has the air of Nietzsche’s last man and entropic liberal dystopia. The nation for Dugin is inferior to the narod, but better than civil society as at least in nation states, there is still a semblance of collective identity, whereas in civil society, this is rejected and increasingly voluntary. Another characteristic difference between the nation and civil society briefly mentioned by Dugin is that the bourgeoisie increasingly reject the nation since it starts to hinder their class interests, and thus they kick the nation away like a ladder.
One of the weaknesses of Ethnos and Society is that its examples and case studies are briefly presented, only sketched out, which makes the demonstration of the theoretical viability of Dugin’s ethnosociological framework a little more difficult to be convincing. Engagement with biological, racial and cognitive theories or data (beyond phenomenology, at least) is not present either, which lessens its potential for broad scientific validity, but the upshot of this omission is that it helps retain the generalisability of the theory.
This model is insightful for historians, but also students and scholars of international relations as this theoretical framework might be effectively utilised in trying to figure out the best approach for governance in periphery countries, especially remote and frontier regions. It can also provide helpful frameworks in having clearer understandings of why policies of migrant integration policies in European countries have little success. Finally, by using the ‘simple to explain the complex’ we gain a richer understanding of all the different types of society that has existed and that we presently coexist with. While Ethnos and Society occasionally lacks nuance, it is frequently insightful, has compelling core concepts, mostly strong and easy to follow explanations, is potentially highly generalisable and is very easy to follow before too long. Ethnos and Society is a fascinating read and comes highly recommended for historians and anyone in the social sciences.
4/5
References
DUGIN, A. 2012. The Fourth Political Theory, London, United Kingdom, Arktos Media Ltd.
DUGIN, A. 2018. Ethnos and Society, London, UK, Arktos Media.
FIGES, O. 2017. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 100th Anniversary Edition, London, The Bodley Head.
CG Kino 