Reading Dugin’s work broadly, his goals are straightforward: the restoration of a powerful, authoritarian Russian state and the internal dissolution of Russia’s enemies, particularly the liberal West. As Dugin argued in “Foundations” and its 2009 follow-up, “The Fourth Political Theory,” the contemporary world order had to be understood as a pitched battle between the forces of “human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness” represented by the “Atlantic” Americans and Europeans, and the distinctly “Eurasian” Russian culture, which was still capable — unlike the sclerotic West — of honoring the mainstays of human life: “God, tradition, community, ethnicity, empires and kingdoms.”

Yet Dugin’s vision of Russian restoration is about more than a geopolitical order. Dugin openly subscribes to a strain of explicitly occultist, reactionary thought known as Traditionalism. Although Traditionalism often ahistorically claimed an older lineage, it can be roughly dated to a network of reactionary artists and writers living in and around Paris during the twilight of the 19th century. A heady blend of dandies and decadents, reactionary Catholics and surrealist Satanists, penniless aristocrats and pretenders to titles, this circle was defined by its alienation from, and rejection of, what it saw as the problems of liberal modernity, in particular its spiritual desiccation and its abandonment of the (often racial and gendered) hierarchies that supposedly defined the world order of a half-imagined, mythical past. The circle was defined, too, by its passion for all manner of the occult — a blend of sincere interest in the magical arts and a thoroughly avant-garde desire to shock. What the world needed, these figures argued, was a return to the old world: a world of honor, of order, of authority, of people who understood that some were naturally sovereign and others enslaved.

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