The Foundations

by Alexander Dugin

  Alexander Rüstow: Nomads and Peasants as Fundamental Types

  The well-known theoretician of neo-liberalism, Alexander Rüstow (1885–1963), developed these ethnosociological ideas of Ratzel, Gumplowicz, Schmidt, Coppers, and Oppenheimer further.110

  Rüstow traced the history of conquering invasions in Eurasia and distinguished a few waves in it:

  • In the Fourth Millennium BCE, it was a torrent of tribes, engaged in breeding large horned cattle.

  • Starting in the Second Millennium BCE the previous sociological type was replaced by tribes breeding horses and moving on chariots.

  • Around 1200 BCE a wave of horsemen ethnoses arise in Asia, attacking Europe and the Near East continuously, the last echo of which is the invasion of the Huns in 375 CE.

  All these movements of narods led to the “superposition” of ethnic cultures and the emergence of states and complex, highly-differentiated societies.

  Rüstow constructed two figures — the “shepherd-nomad” and “settled farmer” — as the two basic social and psychological types, explaining with their help the structure of social stratification. The will to power, domination, the repression of others, and, in particular, material accumulation, as well as technical development, is directed towards increasing the speed of movement (including information), psychological sadism, and, in the pathological stage, forms of paranoid disorders, signs of the shepherd-nomad (in the consciousness of contemporary people, too), while meditativeness, conservatism, unhurriedness, adaptability, peace-lovingness, equilibrium, satisfaction with the existing state of affairs, striving towards harmony with one’s surroundings, and a readiness to submit — right up to masochism and schizophrenia in pathological cases — are signs of “the settled farmer” (in the structure of the human psyche, too).

  Rüstow’s conceptions show how ethnosociological observation can be unfolded to the scale of a universal sociological theory, applicable even there, where the ethnic dimension as such no longer remains: in complex political systems and in the human psyche.

  Max Weber: The Definition of Ethnicity

  The theories of the three brightest German sociologists, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Werner Sombart, who stand at the origins of the field, exerted a significant influence on Ethnosociology.

  Max Weber (1864–1920) is considered the father of European Sociology, alongside Emile Durkheim, since these two scholars did more than others for the institutionalization of Sociology as an authoritative academic science. Weber’s legacy is tremendous and well-known. We will single out only those aspects of his theory that have a relation to Ethnosociology.

  Weber, as we know, gave a definition of ethnicity (Ethnizität), which is considered foundational:

  Ethnicity is those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group formation; at that same time, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.111

  This definition is extremely important, since it moves the ethnos into a sociological category, grounded on “belief,” i.e. on a fundamental characteristic of the social system, and not on a direct mark of generic belonging, which could be interpreted in a biological, evolutionary, or racial manner.

  This definition should be adopted without reservation, since only such an approach creates the possibility of a full-fledged and adequate study of the ethnos as the elementary form of society, as the basic instance of Sociology (koineme).

  Weber himself, however, did not give much attention to the concept of ethnicity in his system, thinking that an ethnic group is just one of various kinds of social groups, established more or less similarly, and, consequently, adding nothing of value to Sociology. In order to understand the nature of such an attitude, we should place Weber’s sociology and the specific character of his approach in its proper historical context.

  The foundation of Weber’s approach to Sociology was built on the identification of the individual, the person, as the major building block of society, from which Weber’s entire theoretical orientation followed, which he called “understanding.” Understanding means penetrating into the structure of a person’s inner world and correctly deciphering the algorithm of his decisions, aims, thoughts, and actions in society. The same approach, at the basis of which lies methodological individualism, is characteristic of the majority of American sociologists, first and foremost those of the Chicago school (Small, Vincent, Thomas, Znaniecki, etc.) and also of Mead, who is similar to them.112 Weber strove to comprehend society as the result of the rational, goal-oriented actions of a multitude of individuals.

  If we compare Weber’s studies with the scale of ethnosociological types of society, then they will occupy precisely the place that lies between “nation” and “civil society,” leaning more so towards the latter, in which individual identity dominates as the basis of the whole society. This is a phenomenon of the Modern Era, the traditions of which date from the Enlightenment and Kant. Weber took as normative the European bourgeois, democratic, liberal, capitalistic society known to him, the origins of which he painstakingly studies in both the epochs immediately preceding its appearance (the Reformation, the Protestant world-view) and in more remote ones (Antiquity), where Weber also tried to find its premises.

  Like Marx and Engels, who projected the economic parameters of the European capitalism of their time backwards into ages past and who wanted to see in them the origins of classes and exploitation, Weber retrojected the parameters of liberal-capitalism and individualism, characteristic of “civil society,” into the most ancient epochs, trying to see in them the rudiments of “individualism” and “rationality.” For this reason, Weber sees social differentiation in all social groups (not in the Marxist sense, but in the sociological understanding of classes as strata), or its preliminary phase. Weber did not occupy himself particularly deeply with archaic societies (in contrast to the later Durkheim and, especially, Marcel Mauss), and therefore his extrapolations (rather rare) in this direction do not carry serious weight.

  At the same time, Weber describes very delicately the meaning of the epoch of Modernity and of “modern societies” and the way they differ from traditional ones. Weber introduces the concept of the “disenchanted world” (entzauberte Welt), the Weltanschauung of a society which loses the dimension of the “holy” and “sacred,” and which stops believing in myths and religion, replacing them with rational philosophy and science.113 Indeed, Weber occupied himself chiefly with studying the process of the “disenchantment” of the world. The concept of “disenchantment” is as fundamental for Weber’s sociology as the concept of “alienation” is for Marxism.

  If we apply Weber’s terminology to the description of the ethnos as a society, then we can say that the ethnos is an “enchanted society” (bezauberte Gesellschaft). French Sociology (Durkheim, Mauss, Halbwachs, etc.) studies the theme of the meaning of the “sacred” in detail.

  In the general context of Ethnosociology, Weber’s theories are entirely relevant to describing the society of Modernity, the establishment of civil society and the depths of the sociological processes that occur during this. The revealed role of the Protestant Work Ethic in the establishment of capitalism is a classic model of Weber’s insight into the heart of the sociological processes of Modernity.

  Ferdinand Tönnies: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

  The German philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) is another key figurehead of German Sociology.

  To Tönnies belongs the well-known dichotomy between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), which is firmly associated with his name and has entered into the arsenal of fundamental sociological methods. Tönnies set forth his concept in the classic 1888 work Community and Society: The Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology.114

  According to Tönnies’ ideas, soci
eties can be built in accordance with two distinct paradigms. In one case, they are built as small groups of a family type, connected by the bonds of real or symbolic kinship, united by emotional ties, empathy, care for all its members, unity of reactions, sociological “holism,” and the recognition of the community as a single being, which characterize a Gemeinschaft. In the second case, societies are created on the basis of agreement, contracts, calculation, rational advantages, and the advancement of group interests, with a distinct stratification and hierarchization, united by common interests, goals, and the pragmatic pursuit of individual profit, achieved with the help of rational social actions, in which case, we are dealing with a Gesellschaft.

  In German both words derive from different roots and have different meanings (which is why they are left untranslated as sociological terms). Gemein means “common,” “belonging to all.” Gesell means “connection” (by assumption, of something separate, uncoordinated, or artificially united). In the Russian words obshchina (community) and obshchestvo (society) this important nuance (which comprises the essence of Tönnies’ distinction) is entirely lost, because of the identity of roots. In Latin, there are two terms that impart the semantic dichotomy precisely enough, communitas and societas.

  The “common” (gemein) is a whole and precedes separation and differentiation. The “united” (gesell) presupposes the prior existence of the separate, distinct, fragmentary.

  Community is thought of organically, as a living being, which is not able to be broken up into parts without detriment to its life; society is thought of mechanically, as an apparatus, which can be taken apart and put back together again (with replaced parts or an updated design, even).

  In these terms, the ethnos is unambiguously and exclusively a Gemeinschaft, i.e., a community, communitas. Ethnosociology takes the community as an ethnic community for its initial instance, the koineme. Derivatives of the ethnos are stages in the transition from community (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft). Civil society is the theoretical model of a pure society, in which nothing remains of community. The narod and the nation are intermediate phases, where the simplicity of community becomes complicated and we meet with elements of both community (preserved from previous phases) and society. In the narod, there is more community than in the nation; and in both cases, they are qualitatively different.

  Thanks to such a classification, universally accepted today, we can distinguish two approaches in sociology itself.

  One approach interprets community as an embryo of society, where society acts as the historic aim, towards which community tends (evolutionism, progressivism, methodological individualism). The other, on the contrary, considers society a consequence of the transformation of community, the structure and characteristics of which affect all the more complex kinds of social system. Ethnosociology is built on the second sociological paradigm. Hence the fundamental ethnosociological thesis of the reversibility of social dimensions, i.e., of the constant open possibility of transition not only from the simple to the complex, from community to society, but also from the complex to the simple, from society to community.

  Werner Sombart: Heroes and Merchants

  The hypothesis of the reversibility of social transformations or, at least, the absence of enthusiasm in the course of observing the establishment of modern society (Gesellschaft) and the search for alternative social paths is characteristic of another major German sociologist, Werner Sombart (1863–1941). If Weber, who was a personal friend of Sombart, welcomed the bourgeois order and liberal democracy, Sombart criticized them harshly, considering them negative social phenomena.

  The sociology of the later Sombart is built on the isolation of two basic social types, “heroes” (Helden) and “merchants” (Händler), who, accordingly, produce two types of society, the “heroic” — religious, chivalrous (for instance, like the European Middle Ages) — and “mercantile” — mercenary, contractual, individualistic, and bourgeois (Modernity).115 The domination of one or another type predetermines the value system of a society, its sociocultural profile, and political and economic structure.

  Bourgeois society and its ideological premises, traced by Sombart not only to the Protestant Work Ethic, but also to Catholic scholasticism and to the individualism implicit in it, are examples of the “society of merchants,” in which the idea of exchange, a universal material equivalent (money), moral flexibility, social adaptivity, technical development, etc., acquire a right of primacy over alternative family values. A society of a “heroic” type, on the other hand, places honor higher than material success, sees morality as rigid and immutable, extols lofty ideals over material interests, proclaims sacrifice, courage, service, and honor more important than profits and technical inventions, and ascribes less importance to money than to power and prestige.

  Sombart, in contrast to Weber, thought that Europe must return to the heroic type. He saw a positive alternative to Modernity in the “normal type” (Sombart’s term, analogous to Weber’s “ideal type”) of organic socialism. Sombart rejected Marx’s proletarian socialism and insisted on “German socialism,” which selected as a socio-political subject not the “class,” but rather the ethnocultural group, united by a common collective value system.116 In such socialism, Sombart thought it expedient to deprive separate individuals of any special rights and to regulate the relations of the state only with concrete social groups. At the same time, Sombart, as a consistent sociologist, was a stranger to biological racism and understood belongingness to a narod not as racial belonging, but as a matter of free spiritual and cultural choice.

  Sombart does not reject hierarchy or the social stratification of society, but proposes to build them not on an economic (class) basis, nor on an individual (liberal) basis, but on the principle of effective, the “heroic,” and in service to the “common good.”

  On the ethnosociological scale of societies, the type of society which Sombart championed corresponds strictly to the level of narod (laos), which brings him closer to Herder, who lived a hundred years earlier and stood historically on the border between the closing heroic epoch of the narod — the European Middle Ages, so dear to him and the Romantics — and the beginning of the century of classes, nations, and the domination of “merchants.” Ethnosociology borrows from Sombart the dichotomy hero/merchant, which corresponds strictly to the first derivative of the ethnos (narod/laos) and the second and third derivatives of the ethnos (nation, civil society).

  Moritz Lazarus: Der Volksgeist

  Moritz Lazarus, Wilhelm Wundt, and Alfred Vierkandt, representatives of German ethnopsychology, made a major contribution to the development of the discipline of ethnosociology.

  The initiator of this orientation was the German philosopher and psychologist Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), one of the founders of the Journal of Volk-Psychology and Linguistics (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft).

  Lazarus further developed Herder’s theory of the existence of a Volksgeist (narodni spirit), but he described it in his scientific formulations as the total unification of individual spirits, which forms a common psycho-cultural field.117 The Volksgeist manifests itself in language, mores, customs, institutions, games, folklore, etc. The study of this phenomenon, according to Lazarus, is the psychologist’s task.

  The concept of a Volksgeist, developed by Lazarus, assumed the subordination of the individual, rational, and pragmatic principles of action to the stronger and more effective collective paradigm, which is a total phenomenon and shapes the structure of individual psychology.

  The classical sociology of Durkheim and Mauss regards precisely this collective and strictly supra-individual instance as being of principal importance, but it defines it as a “society,” whereas Lazarus operates with the concept of the das Volk (the narod). For ethnosociology, the very possibility of a methodological identification of the narod (for Lazarus) and society (for Durkheim) is extremely significant, since with certain refinements i
t brings us to the conception of the ethnos as koineme, i.e., as the simplest and primordial form of society.

  Wilhelm Wundt: Völkerpsychologie

  Lazarus’ ideas exerted a massive influence on his contemporary, the philosopher and founder of classical experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). In the early stages of his scientific career, Wundt proceeded from a belief in the universality of psychological experience and in his experiments (he was the organizer of the first psychological laboratory in history) he strove to study the structure of the emergence of religious opinions, the mechanism of emotions, voluntary actions, associations, etc. Wundt’s orientation is called “Structuralist” or “holistic,” since Wundt thought of the human psyche as an integral whole — a claim that the behaviorist school later opposed actively.

  In a later period, Wundt focused on studying the “psychology of narods” (Völkerpsychologie), supposing, following Lazarus, that different ethnic societies have entirely unique collective specifics of mind, which Wundt tried to systematize in his hefty ten-volume work The Psychology of Peoples, which laid the foundations of Ethnopsychology.118

  To a large extent, Wundt influenced such eminent anthropologists and ethnosociologists as Boas and Malinowski.

  For Ethnosociology, the works of Wundt reveal the prospect of a psychological approach to the study of the ethnos and its derivatives, which proposes to apply the methods and conceptions of modern psychology to the study of ethnic structures and processes.

  Alfred Vierkandt: Phenomenology of the Ethnos