The Foundations

by Alexander Dugin

  Spencer’s ideas, which give the “struggle for survival” a legitimate status in society, were picked up by two political ideologies of the 20th century: neoliberalism, which considers inequality and the rule of the rich and successful over the poor and unlucky a norm of economic life, and racism, justifying the inequality of races among themselves and the dominance of the White race on a global scale as the results of this struggle, in which the “fittest” (the Whites) were victorious.

  Evolutionary ideas affected a whole series of anthropologists, who accumulated significant material concerning simple societies, i.e., ethnoses. Their approach was based on the conviction that they were studying lower types and forms of social life from the position of the higher. Hence their conclusions and methods are very doubtful: in archaic tribes, they tried to find something resembling contemporary or historically fixed complex societies and to interpret antiquity as a crude and primitive form of that which is known to them as complex societies. They ignored everything that would not fit into this conception. Despite “evolutionary racism,” substantially lowering the worth of such works, they can be considered as working material for ethnosociologists, after, of course, the corresponding adjustments have been made.

  The classic representatives of this line are the American ethnologist Louis Morgan (1818–1881), the English anthropologists Edward Taylor (1832–1917) and James George Frazier (1854–1941), and the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939).

  Racial Theories

  Racial theories broadly understood are anthropological, sociological, or culturological systems at the basis of which lies the assumption that phenotypic (appearance), psychological, physiological and other biological characteristics of people indicating their common origin (race) directly and tangibly affect the structure of the societies formed by these people. Thus, racial theories are based on the assertion of a direct connection between biological and social factors in the understanding of society and the ethnos. Racial theories try to describe and justify this connection.

  S. M. Shirokogoroff characterizes the variety of racial theories as follows:

  In modern times the naturalist Carl Linnaeus separated all people into three types:

  1) ‘Wild man’, ‘Homo ferus’, to which were ascribed chiefly cases of the transformation of children left without a human upbringing into a wild, animal condition;

  2) ‘Monstrous man’, ‘Homo monstruosus’, to which were ascribed microcephals and other pathological cases, and

  3) ‘Upright man’, ‘Homo diurnus’, of which there are four races: American, European, Asian, and African, differing by a set of physical peculiarities. Linnaeus specifies also ethnographic markers. In his opinion, Americans are led by customs, Europeans by laws, Asians by opinions, and Africans by lawlessness. (…)

  At the end of the 18th century Johannes Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) developed a completely independent classification, basing it on hair and skin color and skull shape. Blumenbach counts five races, specifically:

  1) The Caucasian race — white, with a round head, lives in North America, Europe and Asia to the Gobi Desert;

  2) The Mongolian race — has a square head shape, black hair, a yellow-colored face, and slanting eyes, and lives in Asia, except for the Malaysian archipelago;

  3) The Ethiopian race — black, with a flattened head, lives in Africa;

  4) The American race — with copper-colored skin and a deformed head;

  5) The Malay race — has chestnut hair and a moderately round head. This classification should be considered as purely anthropological and somatic.

  Fr. Miller introduced language as a marker in his classification. He proposed that hair color and language are the most stable markers and can serve as a foundation for the subdivision of people into races; and he establishes that there exist:

  1) Wooly-haired — Hottentots, Bushmen, Papuans;

  2) Fleecy-haired — Africans, Negroes, Kaffirs;

  3) Straight-haired — Australians, Americans, Mongols, and

  4) Curly-haired — Mediterraneans.

  In sum these races give another twelve groups.

  Skipping other classifications, as for instance that of Schiller, White, and Haeckel, which recognized four lineages and thirty-four races, that of Coleman, which recognized six races and eighteen varieties, and others, I will also state, as the most original effort, the classification of Deniker, who established thirteen races and twenty-nine groups, basing himself, similar to a botanist, as he himself says of his method, on all anthropological markers. Finally, Professor Ivanovski established another forty-one groups.52

  Racism

  Not always but often enough racial theories spill over into racism, which is their extreme expression.

  Racism is a theory that asserts that a person’s individual traits and the specific character of the social arrangement are determined to a significant (sometimes, decisive) extent by the fact of their racial makeup. The hierarchy of races built on this foundation subdivides them into higher and lower. The thesis of the inequality of races is the fundamental marker of racism.

  The French sociologist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was the first to try to formulate a racist theory, in his book Essay on the Inequality of Human Races.53 In the four volumes of this lengthy work, Gobineau summarizes a tremendous amount of data, in which are included also his own observations and studies. On this basis, he advanced the hypothesis that three races — the White, Black, and Yellow — display vividly expressed (innate) tendencies, skills, priorities, and social attitudes, each structured differently. The White race is distinguished by its rationality, tendency towards the ordering of systems, and interest in technology. The yellow race is contemplative and unhurried. The Black race is chaotic and anarchic, but talented in music, dance, and plastics.

  Despite conventional opinion, Gobineau does not order the races in a hierarchy, but understands inequality as differences predominating in each of their sociological patterns. Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the most authoritative and fundamental opponents of racism, in his book Race and History specifies that one should not confuse the ideas of Gobineau with those conclusions that racists made from his work.54

  The sociologist and founder of social psychology Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) notes inequality in the psychology of different narods. In his book The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples, he, in the spirit of Gobineau, remarks that different ethnoses, narods, and races gravitate predominantly to diverse spheres of action and bear in their psychology one set of attitudes and inclinations to the detriment of others.55 Le Bon notes that left to themselves, Englishmen, for instance, will quickly form a political system of self-government, while the members of the Romantic narods (Spaniards, Portuguese, or Italians) will more likely descend into anarchy and chaos.

  The semantic transition from the constant “inequality,” understood as difference, to the hierarchization of race occurs with the English sociologist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), who is a key figure in the establishment of racism. In his major work Foundations of the 19th Century, Chamberlain describes his version of world history, in which the members of the “White race” (“Aryans”) act as the positive force and are opposed by the “lower” (“colored”) races. In Chamberlain’s opinion, the Semitic narods, chiefly the Jews, bring the greatest harm to the “Aryans.” The struggle of the “higher” races (“Aryans”) with the “lower” ones comprises the essence of history, both ancient and modern. Chamberlain’s theory is not only racial, but racist, since it is based on the recognition of “lower” and “higher” races. This theory was put at the foundation of German National-Socialism and practically became the official version of the exposition of world history in the Third Reich.

  The French sociologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936) built his racial theory on the opposition of “dolichocephalics” (people with an elongated, oblong skull) and brachycep
halics (people with a round skull-structure).56 He considered the first “higher” people (“Aryans”) and the second “lower” ones. He distinguishes three races in Europe:

  • Homo europeus — this type is characteristic for Northern European countries, in the first place of German origin);

  • Homo alpinus — the inhabitants of Central Europe;

  • Homo mediterraneus — the type most diffused around the Mediterreanean

  De Lapouge establishes a hierarchy between them, claiming that Homo europeus is the “pure” racial type, and Homo mediterraneus a mix with other non-European races and hence lower. Homo alpinus represents an “intermediate instance.”

  In the United States, the anthropologist Madison Grant (1865–1937), a close friend of two American presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, tried to give racism a “scientific” character. Grant was able to advance a few key legislative initiatives, limiting immigration to the US and even facilitating the “Act Concerning Racial Purity” (1924), formally forbidding interracial marriages.

  In his book Disappearance of the Great Race Grant celebrates the “Nordic race” (by which he understands the population of Northern Europe), to which, in his opinion, the US owes its world might, and he demands the implementation of “eugenics” — special rules of marriage laws, aimed at the purification of race and its improvement. He glorifies the principle of “racial purity” and proposes to place members of the “lower races” into the ghetto by force, forbidding them to leave its confines.

  One of the most influential theoreticians of racism alongside de Lapouge and Madison Grant in the 20th century was Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891–1968), who distinguished the following taxonomy of races in Europe:57 , 58

  1. Nordic

  2. Dinaric

  3. Alpine

  4. Mediterranean

  5. Western

  6. Eastern-Baltic

  Günther considered members of the Nordic race — tall, blue-eyed, dolichocephalic — to be the creators of civilization. He considered Africans and Asians defective. The worst lot fell to the Jews, whom Gunter associated with the “representatives of Asia in Europe” and, correspondingly, considered the main “racial enemy.”

  Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), who was one of the ideologists of the Third Reich and who was executed in accordance with the judgement of the Nuremberg tribunal, in his writings (in particular, in The Myth of the 20th Century), set out the political-dogmatic version of these ideas, aiming at their practical implementation.59

  Racism became a fundamental part of National-Socialist ideology, and the realization of racial principles carried in its wake the death of millions of innocent people.

  The Racist Aspect of the Study of the Human Genome

  In our time, scientists working on calculating the structure of the human genome are often subjected to accusations of racism. Fears are especially evoked by attempts to create a centralized genetic bank, where facts about the genes of different ethnic and racial groups would be amassed.

  At the vanguard of such research activities the Institute of Population and Resource Studies (Morrison Institute), acting within the framework of Stanford University on the “Human Genome Diversity Project” (HGDP) stands out in particular.60

  The project’s goal is to collect data concerning the blood composition of a great number of inhabitants of the Earth, classified along ethnic and racial markers, in order to trace the genealogy of their distant ancestors. It is offered to anyone who wishes to send a few drops of their blood, collected and packaged in a certain way, to this institution can learn of their origins right up to the first humans. For a separate fee the employees of this institution take it upon themselves to reconstruct the full ethnic genealogy of the ancestors and to send out an attestation of its authenticity.

  Besides the fact that the models of genetic reconstruction of the past are based on rather contestable paradigms and cannot be considered scientifically reliable, the use of genetic information in the future provokes serious apprehensions. Many fear that this will be used for the development of a genetic weapon, capable of striking the members of some specific ethnos or concrete race. A number of countries — China in particular — prohibit the collection of such information on their territories, with the aim of bolstering state security.

  Criticism of Racial and Biological Approaches

  Racial and racist approaches are inadmissible in Ethnosociology for a number of reasons. Even if the moral side of the question and the memory of the criminal practice of the introduction of “racial laws” in the Third Reich and the millions of people who became their victims require no further discussion, it is still much more important to explain the scientific unfitness of these theories.

  First, the very notion of human races, as Shirokogoroff showed, is exceedingly imprecise, and different systems of classification propose mutually exclusive forms of their definition. Either too few (three or four) or too many races are distinguished. In such an unsettled and imprecise taxonomy, it is simply impossible to make some kind of justified sociological conclusions.

  Second, there are no clear and well-founded studies scientifically proving a direct connection between the structure of a society and the racial peculiarities of the people who created it. Even if certain observations do attest to different tendencies of this or that racial group, then it still is not completly obvious that genetic and racial, rather than sociological, cultural, and historical factors are specifically responsible for them.

  Third, when we are talking about the variation of races and more so of the hierarchy among them, then those characteristics, values or attitudes dominating in the society to which the researcher himself belongs serve as criteria. He implicitly accepts his values as normative, and the values of other groups, different from his own, as lower. There are no racial theorists who would reckon themselves among the “lower race.” Consequently, in this case we are dealing not with science, but with ideology.

  Fourth, there are no reasons to impart to the quality of greater complexity and differentiation of society a mark of superiority. A more complex society is more complex, period; it does not follow from this that it is better than a simple one. We live in a complex society, but this does not at all mean that simple societies are worse than ours.

  Fifth, nothing proves that the technical and material advancements of a society are the final criteria of its superiority or that they are related to underlying racial factors.

  Sixth, all ethnoses existing today and existing previously are products of a repeated and many-sided mixing, including also racial mixing. To separate out a “pure” element is impossible both theoretically and practically. It is curious that in our time the maximum quantity of blonde and blue-eyed people is met with among the Finno-Ugric population, which not a single racial theory relates to the “Aryans.”

  Seventh, there is not one criterion (phenotype, craniometry, osteometry, the structure of the hair covering, etc.) which might serve as a reliable marker in the study of the genetic continuity of a race.

  Eighth, the biological constituent and hypothesis of the “animal” principle in man, which lies at the basis of the biosocial and racial approaches, cannot serve as an explanation of social phenomena, since the properly human in man is precisely not the animal but another principle, separating man from beasts and other creatures and things of the external world. This is the fundamental fact that man does not exist without society.

  All of this applies not only to properly racial and racist theories, but also to Social-Darwinism and the theory of evolution, which also carry a veiled racist charge. The more developed and complex society is considered better in comparison with less developed and simpler ones; more technologically equipped and materially successful societies as higher in comparison with less equipped and successful ones. Such a model of reasoning and system of appealing arguments completely reproduces the logic of racism: the White race is stronger and
better equipped (more successful), consequently, it is higher than the “colored” races. Evolutionists and supporters of the theory of progress do not appeal to white and non-white races, but societies are subject to hierarchization: developed societies are strong and better equipped (more successful), consequently they are higher than undeveloped ones. In both cases, the position that the researcher himself occupies is higher. And this is racism.

  Ethnosociology as a discipline accepts neither the biosocial nor, even more importantly, the racial approach. It is based on the study of societies, the ethnos and its derivatives as a human phenomenon, “human society,” in which neither the animal nor the material components are dominating and decisive.

  Ethnosociology rejects social analysis in which terms such as “lower” and “higher society,” “more developed” and “less developed,” “more perfect” and “less perfect” are used. We know different types of society and different forms of social processes exist. We can compare the former and clarify the orientation of others, but all of this must be done without moral assessment and without the certainty that that we know the goal towards which social history aims. Social history is reversible.

  That Primordialism which can be taken as a basic paradigm of ethnosociological analysis is exclusively cultural.

  Cultural Primordialism

  Cultural Primordialism is fundamental for Ethnosociology. Cultural Primordialism means that we consider the ethnos as a basic, fundamental category and the primordial basis of society. But Cultural Primordialism does not include a biological component in the concept of the ethnos, while the question of lineage and lineal belonging is considered in the general context of the ethnic structure.

  Cultural Primordialism considers the ethnos as the most basic form of an endogamous social group, and, accordingly, as a koineme.