As Putin and Xi push for a “multipolar” world where liberal democracy is just one model among many, their challenge to Western Enlightenment ideals is gaining momentum – fueled by Trump’s second presidency and surging “radical conservativism” in Europe. Finnish philosopher Jussi Backman argues that an anti-liberal theory of reality is on the rise, providing a wide-ranging metaphysical underpinning for would-be geopolitical revolutionaries. Drawing on Heidegger, figures like Aleksandr Dugin – sometimes described as Putin’s philosopher – portray liberal metaphysics as inevitably leading to nihilism, posing a serious ideological challenge that liberals and the left need to take seriously.

In Weimar-era Germany, a loosely connected group of writers, theorists and activists challenged the rise of liberal democracy, individualism, materialism, egalitarianism, and socialism. Heirs to the German tradition of Counter-Enlightenment, with its skepticism regarding universal progress, these so-called “conservative revolutionaries” were inspired by Nietzschean ideas of the eternal recurrence of the same and an elitist “aristocracy of spirit.” The relationship of the conservative revolutionaries to rising Nazism was ambivalent. Some, including Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger, sharply opposed the racist mass movement; others, including Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, conformed and became party members.

The German conservative revolution was swept away by Nazism, the Second World War and the Cold War, but in recent decades its legacy has been reclaimed by figures in the European New Right, most prominent among them the French Alain de Benoist (b. 1943), a key source of inspiration for the Identitarian right-wing movement, and his mentee and collaborator, the Russian Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), the leading ideologist of Russian Neo-Eurasianism. De Benoist and Dugin are perhaps most accurately described as “radical conservatives.” Since they both take some of their central philosophical ideas from Heidegger, they are also “right Heideggerians.”

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For Dugin, Heidegger’s philosophy of history provides a model that is at once conservative – involving a cyclic return to a beginning rather than linear progress – and revolutionary.

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In spite of his notorious Nazi involvement, Heidegger’s main intellectual influence in prewar Germany and postwar France and Italy was among liberal and left-leaning circles. For example, Gianni Vattimo, the left-wing Italian philosopher and politician, explicitly identified his position as “left Heideggerianism.” Nonetheless, Dugin portrays Heidegger as the philosopher of the conservative revolution, concerned, in his later thought, with an impending end of Western modernity and the possibility of a new beginning – a new, transformed framework for Western thought. For Dugin, Heidegger’s philosophy of history provides a model that is at once conservative – involving a cyclic return to a beginning rather than linear progress – and revolutionary: this return is not a reactionary “going back” to an ideal past and does not seek to “cancel” modernity, but rather looks forward to reactivating a lost beginning in an entirely new situation that follows the “completion” of modernity.

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