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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
In the Ideas Letter, political scientist Marlene Laruelle has a very clever comparison between two people who are apparent opposites—Alexander Dugin and Timothy Snyder:
On paper, Timothy Snyder and Alexander Dugin should have nothing to say to each other. Snyder is an American historian and a longtime history professor at Yale, now at the University of Toronto, whose authority rests on the years he spent studying the different forms of state violence that shaped Eastern Europe under both the Nazi and the Stalinist regimes. Dugin is a Russian political philosopher and self-taught esoteric thinker, more at home with occult speculations than archival footnotes. He is also a disciple of the so-called Traditionalist School of Julius Evola and René Guénon, an anti-modernist philosophy that seeks the return to a metaphysical order.
The distance between them is not only intellectual but also political. Snyder became one of Donald Trump’s most insistent critics and a vocal advocate for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s aggression, starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014; Dugin spent the same decade as the man whom many Western journalists have called, mostly out of intellectual laziness, “Putin’s brain.”
So yes, the two should have nothing to say to each other. And yet when their claims are placed side by side, the similarities become hard to miss. Despite their opposing politics, Snyder and Dugin often rely on the same underlying way of thinking. Both offer a master concept that promises total clarity, divides politics into moral absolutes, and frames Russia as an atemporal civilizational entity.
They also write posturing in the vein of prophecy. And they cultivate a kind of apocalyptic thinking that locates the crisis abroad rather than at home. Each of their master concepts is grand enough to explain an epoch and is wielded as a decoder: Whoever has not grasped it looks, at best, naive.
You might say they both had a mythic outlook. Before my vacation, I was reading Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946). Cassirer is neglected today, but along with his rival Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most important German philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. His basic idea was that man was an animal symbolicum—a symbol-making animal, a thesis he developed in his primary work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The Myth of the State is his attempt to understand the rise of the Nazis. I thought the passages on how the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, the French aristocrat who essentially invented race science, differed from patriotism and nationalism were very interesting and relevant since there is a constant attempt to reinject this poison into public consciousness:
