Against the Misclassification of Dugin: A Response to Mark Sedgwick, or "Why Dugin is not a Traditionalist"
Mark Sedgwick's recent article, "Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist Roots" (2025), continues a trend of overstating Dugin's ties to the Traditionalist School. While Sedgwick is perhaps the most well-known scholar of the Traditionalist milieu, his insistence on classifying Dugin within this lineage reveals a category error of both philosophical and political consequence. Dugin may have read Guénon and Evola, but to read and even cite Traditionalist sources is not the same as embodying or upholding the metaphysical commitments that define the Traditionalist School.
To begin with a clarification of position: I read and engage Heidegger, but I am not a Heideggerian. My metaphysics descends from the Akbarian tradition, through the school of Mullā Ṣadrā, tempered by Shaykhī and Bābī theology. I am not a Traditionalist. Politically, I sit on the Marxist Left, though I reject classical Marxism's rejection of religion. Likewise, Dugin’s engagement with Traditionalism does not make him a Traditionalist in any meaningful sense—especially not when examined against the Traditionalist School's own internal standards.
The most conspicuous disqualifier is ontological. Traditionalism holds that metaphysics is the key to understanding all domains of existence. Its cosmology is symbolic, hierarchical, anagogical. Being is always bound to the Absolute. But Dugin’s ontology is Heideggerian: Dasein as finite being-there. Heidegger, again and again, insisted that Dasein is not God. In Traditionalist metaphysics, however, Being (al-wujūd) is essentially God, or at least theophanic. This divergence is not trivial; it is a foundational incompatibility. Sedgwick glosses over this ontological rupture as though it were peripheral, when in fact it undoes the entire claim to metaphysical continuity.
Moreover, Dugin’s writings are not grounded in symbolic metaphysics or perennial theology. His Fourth Political Theory is a work of political strategy, not metaphysical vision. The appendix on "Chaos" does not invoke Shakti, nor ḥikmat al-ishrāq, nor the primacy of the One beyond being. It is not rooted in Kashmiri Shaivism, Hermeticism, or Islamic cosmology. Instead, it recycles Heidegger’s mood (Stimmung), the abyss (Abgrund), and existential “dread” as political affect. Chaos here is a geopolitically useful metaphor, not a metaphysical principle. There is no analogical resonance, no chain of Being. Dugin speaks the language of mythic nationalism and civilizational will, not divine manifestation.
Indeed, the very test by which the Traditionalist School defines itself—through sacred order, perennial metaphysics, and symbolic cosmology—is the test Dugin fails. Guénon was unequivocal in his critique of modern political ideologies, including nationalism. Schuon centered the Transcendent Unity of Religions, not imperial civilizational blocs. Even Nasr, in his own statist alliances, has never severed doctrine from metaphysics. Dugin's project, by contrast, is fundamentally political, not metaphysical. His concern is civilizational identity, Eurasian unity, and the restoration of empire—not the realization of the Self or the return to the Divine Principle.
To call Dugin a Traditionalist is thus to take serious liberties with the term. At best, he is a post-Heideggerian political existentialist who selectively borrows Traditionalist tropes when rhetorically convenient. At worst, his appropriation of Traditionalist vocabulary obfuscates a fundamentally modern, existentialist, and nationalist project beneath a veneer of esoteric depth.
Sedgwick would do well to revisit both Heidegger and Guénon with a more critical lens. A proper reading of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics or Beiträge zur Philosophie makes clear that his Being is not the metaphysical One of the perennialists. Likewise, re-engaging Guénon's The Reign of Quantity or Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions would show just how incompatible Dugin's political theology is with the Traditionalist ethos.
If we are to maintain intellectual integrity in our classifications, then let us be precise. Traditionalism is a doctrine of metaphysical return, not a toolkit for nationalist revolution. Dugin’s thought may be many things—strategic, dangerous, even profound in its own way—but it is not Traditionalist. To say otherwise is to mistake citation for conviction, and style for substance.
