late nineteenth-century Europe. In the belief of these organizations, politics remains fundamentally distorted and inorganic as long as certain social, cultural, and economic conditions, proceeding from wealthy Jewish lobbies and associated cultural activities, are permitted to prevail. Political anti-Semitism is thus concerned less with the philosophy and mechanics of politics, than with social criticism, the promotion of national-ethnic unity, and the achievement of a small number of very broad political objectives based on ethnocentric principles.

Dugin is a different thinker entirely. Although touching on social criticism, he is deeply fascinated, if not infatuated, with the minutiae, etymology, and genealogy of ‘the Political’ as both methodology and ideology. In Political Platonism, the more interesting of the two 2019 books by a considerable margin, Dugin offers a panegyric to the politicalBoas as “the outstanding ethnographer, philosopher, and anthropologist.” (E:TF, 153)

In Ethnosociology: The Foundations, a highly technical book very different in tone and style from Political Platonism, Dugin attempts to divorce the concept of ethnicity from racial considerations, presumably as part of a broader scheme to overcome racial differences and create a new Eurasianist ethnicity (and thus, power bloc) spanning much of Eastern Europe and encompassing also some North Caucasian Turkic peoples and Balkars. In pursuit of this grand ambition, he has produced a text that is actually one of the most scathing attacks on racial thinking I’ve read in recent years.

The book starts with an overview of the development of Russian ethnosociology and an attempt to define ethnicity. It takes just thirteen short pages for Dugin to grapple