Multipolarity

A Review

[I thought I might do something a bit different and offer a review of a contemporary book that I feel makes for important reading for anyone interested in understanding the current state of geopolitics. By way of disclaimer, Constantin von Hoffmeister is a friend, but I can assure you this review represents my honest opinion, which I am confident will be validated by anyone who reads the book himself. Subscribe to him at Eurosiberia or Arktos Journal, and check out Arktos Media for other great books.]

Multipolarity! Constantin von Hoffmeister. Arktos Media Ltd. January 6, 2025. 140 pages.

Supporters and detractors of Donald Trump share one unanimous consensus- his election heralded a true revolution in global events. He represents an instantiation rather than an impetus; the paradigm shift arguably began with the failed War on Terror, then proceeded through the financial disaster of 2008, the Covid hysteria, and finally the War in Ukraine. At each step, the managers of the neoliberal world order proved unable to manage, discrediting them according to their own rationale for legitimacy. The globalist elite is no longer able to determine events according to their collective interest as rising powers emerge, able to act in defiance of the “rules-based order” that had hitherto constrained them.

The Cold War represented a bipolar world order, with Communism and Liberalism contending for supremacy in a contest largely fought in the Third World. The victory of the latter was held to inaugurate an End of History, with a triumphant McWorld mopping up the remains of a reactionary Jihad. This is now shown to have been ephemeral, like the Athenian Empire of Classical antiquity, brought low by overreach and hubris. The West sold the industrial base painstakingly built up by better men to its enemies and used the proceeds to turn its economy into a casino where the house always wins. It manufactured consent for its authority by importing a caste of dependents rewarded with wealth extracted from natives who still remember a time when they were freer and happier. It embarked on feckless foreign adventures presided over by mediocrities promoted into sinecures in government, the media, business, and universities, all one interconnected system of matronage that rewarded traits like conformity, servility, and mendacity, and punished forthright courage and integrity.

All of this has led to a vacuum filled in by new powers, the inception of the multipolar world. I say new powers, but they are really the old powers, reasserting themselves over and against the interregnum of liberalism. Parallel to this is an insurgent rightist and traditionalist movement spanning cultures and continents within the West and without. Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, R. R. Reno’s Strong Gods- they’ve all returned and have brought with them notions long thought dead and buried. To understand this, there is perhaps no more useful primer than Constantin von Hoffmeister’s Multipolarity.

Multipolarity is best understood as a short introduction to wider and deeper treatments of the subject, most notably Alexander Dugin’s political theory of Eurasianism. It is a collection of essays that tie themes from rightist thought into a larger geopolitical narrative, thorough without being systematic. That is not a drawback; the book is useful for those looking for intersections between current events and their theoretical implications, rather than as a comprehensive treatment of theory as such. It is perhaps most similar to works by Robert D. Kaplan- Balkan Ghosts, The Revenge of Geography, The Coming Anarchy, etc- a stack of snapshots that, when thumbed through with intensity and focus, present a moving image. But while Kaplan is essentially a neoconservative wedded to Western hegemony, von Hoffmeister presents a thoroughly right wing worldview informed by emerging currents in contemporary philosophy.

Dugin provides a forward for the book and Steve Turley wrote the introduction; the latter is a popular exegete of the theories of Samuel Huntington, whose The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order posited exactly those developments that have now come to pass. The book does not dwell much on American and British thinkers, however, and leans toward contemporary or near-contemporary rightist Continental European thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Alain de Benoist, and Guillaume Faye. For those whose experience is limited to the Anglosphere, Multipolarity will prove a useful supplement and even a corrective.

The format of individual essays allows the book to frame multipolarity according to various nuances. Concepts like nationalism, for example, pop up in different places with varying shades of meaning. Rather than the staid liberal project of the nation in the 19th century understanding, von Hoffmeister draws on the thought of de Benoist to call for ‘ethnopluralism’ within states, a sort of cultural relativism that would allow ethnic groups to police themselves according to their own traditions. In keeping with thinkers like Julius Evola and Rene Guenon, von Hoffmiester rejects reductive understandings of identity based solely on DNA or IQ, in favor of a more transcendent understanding of the relationship between self and society.

In this, von Hoffmeister draws heavily on Martin Heidegger by way of Dugin, who frame identity according to dasein- a state of being-as-becoming, man being at once bound to unchanging spiritual realities and shaped by his material circumstances. Race essentialism, as such, cuts man off from that fixed part of his deeper nature. A multipolar world allows for the construction of varying and complementary identities that reflect both the particular circumstances of peoples bound up in time and place, and also reflects the reality of a common humanity apart from and beyond any one group.

For von Hoffmeister and those he cites, liberalism is a radical ideology of global homogenization, reducing those things which should be universal on the transcendent level to the temporal, and raising those things which are really the product of a particular time and place to the realm of cosmic reality. In a sense, though the author does not directly reference him in this regard, it is as though Mircea Eliade’s sacred and profane spheres are wholly inverted, where man-made constitutions become holy and religion and tradition are treated as matters of individual consumer taste. Liberalism in that sense is responsible for racism due to its obsessive need to categorize every part of nature, including humans, according to fixed, empirical categories, a trait Heidegger calls gestell, a technological ordering of the world, the characteristic liberal understanding of reality explored at greater length in Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Von Hoffmeister offers several models for how this might work in practice. He explores the various iterations of the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union, which allowed for a wide range of nations to exist under a central political unity. He ranges the widest in his chapter examining the prospects for ethnopluralism in Africa, drawing on theorists like Farafin Sanduono in rejecting the nation state as a failed legacy of colonialism and instead embracing ethnic subsidiary political groupings under regional cooperative structures. For the author, multipolarity reflects not a ideological project of western thought but a sort of human default, upset by messianic secular utopianism on occasion but receding always to nature’s true course.

Lines of thought like this show the right at its best. Von Hoffmeister is not afraid to entertain heterodox thought, drawing not only on Pan-Africanism, but anti-colonial theory more generally. His comparison of parts of the American Rust Belt to Indian reservations brought to mind the work of Russell Means, the iconoclastic libertarian Indian radical. This is a book that cites Marcus Garvey and W.E.B Dubois alongside Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, not to mention Rudyard Kipling and H. P. Lovecraft. Blank slate optimist Franz Boas gets respectful treatment, as does determinist doomer Oswald Spengler.

Does it all work? Yes, with a few caveats. The idea of ethnopluralism sounds suspiciously like multiculturalism, and as a political solution begs some obvious questions. While the secular and deracinated peoples of Europe might be content to live with a self-governing ummah in their midst, that’s not quite the same thing as the Dar-al-Islam being happy to forgo Jihad within the very Dar-al-Harb itself. Islam wants peace on its terms, and can abide no rival spiritual system. Creating a Muslim Danelaw within a western nation simply invites predation and exploitation.

On a superficial level, Rome was a political unity ruling over an empire characterized by spiritual plurality. More fundamentally, however, Rome was content to allow a range of subsidiary polities while demanding spiritual allegiance; you could keep your client kings, but sacrifice to the genius of the emperors was mandatory. Allowing the Jews to forgo such rituals created the space in which that spirituality that would supplant Rome’s paganism could grow and flourish, and by the time the empire sought to snuff it out for good it was already on its way to overthrowing the old gods. I mean of course Christianity. No pole in the multipolar world is anything without a unifying religious vision, and conflict is inevitable in a world where multiple such visions must contend amidst absolute truth claims that liberalism sought- and failed- to render irrelevant. The Civilization State is necessarily a confessional state, and to the degree they tolerate deviant beliefs in their midst it must be with the understanding that they are officially regarded as such.

Von Hoffmeister recognizes this in places, noting the inevitability of remigration for incompatible populations that have flooded the West. But it is difficult to see that happening without a revival of Christianity, and this is the rub that stops a lot of rightist projects. If you want Charlemagne’s Empire, you need Charlemagne’s faith, and the paladins to enforce it. But of course, the primary spiritual enemy is not Islam, but liberalism, that enervating pseudofaith that has lulled the men of the west into a football and Ikea coma. Fell that sacred oak, and you’ll have conquered a great foe.

As a whole, I highly recommend this book. It is readable, concise, and as noted, thorough considering its relative brevity. Longer and more systematic treatments of the subject are out there, but especially if the subject of multipolarity is new to you, or you want a better grounding in it, then you should definitely read this. It is also a great source for contemporary Continental European rightist thought on the topic as well, and should serve as inspiration to read more from Dugin, Faye and Benoist, as well as older philosophers. Get your copy here.