This is Rusty Reno, editor of First Things Magazine.

Welcome to the editor's desk, our regular podcast, where we look at material in the latest First Things magazine.

And for this episode, I'm talking to Michael Millerman, the author of Beginning with

Heidegger, Strauss, Rory Deirda, Dugan, and the philosophical constitution of the

political. And Michael has penned for us in the February 2023 issue, an essay on Alexander Duggan.

Many think to be the resputin to Vladimir Putin, and it's appropriately titled Alexander Dugan

Explain. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me.

Alexander Dugan. Who is this guy, like name rank, serial number, background, that sort of thing?

Okay. For people who don't know, a helpful way of thinking about him

is that he's a Russian philosopher, ideologue, and activist. So he combines several functions

that sometimes are parceled out among several people in other cases. He has books that are,

you could say, purely theoretical, or very philosophical, somehow abstract and not directly

related to political life. And on the opposite extreme of the spectrum, he has works that are

meant to shape the direction of Russian foreign policy, Russia's place in the world to geopolitically,

and that are effectively ideological manuals for the Russian government, if it's looking for some sort

of worldview to follow, which lately, as I think we see, it has some sort of worldview that

it's trying to follow. So he has been instrumental in shaping a vision for Russia in a

multipolar world. He opposed what happened to Russian policy after the victory of liberalism

as he sees it at a unipolar moment, the dominance of the United States and the world. So he's been

developing in geopolitics, in other branches of thought, ethno-sociology, for example, theology as

well, political theory,

an alternative model to Western political modernity, both as I say with its intellectual interest and with its political component. And he became famous, among other things, in 2014,

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